igh and honourable a heart, that they
would not, were they to die for it, take for their object
the base things which honour and conscience disapprove: for
the soul, which is only created that it may return to its
Sovereign Good, does naught while it is in the body but long
for the attainment of this. But because the senses by which
alone it can acquire information are darkened and made
carnal by the sin of our first father, they can only show
her the visible things which approach closest to
perfection--and after these the soul runs, thinking to find
in outward beauty, in visible grace, and in moral virtue,
grace, beauty, and virtue in sovereign degree. But when she
has sought them and tried them, and finds not in them Him
whom she loves, she leaves them alone,[114] just as a child,
according to his age, likes dolls and other trivialities,
the prettiest he sees, and thinks a collection of pebbles
actual riches, but as he grows up prefers his dolls alive,
and gets together the goods necessary for human life. Yet
when he knows, by still wider experience, that in earthly
things there is neither perfection nor felicity, he desires
to seek the Creator and the Source of these. Nevertheless,
if God open not the eye of faith in him he would be in
danger of becoming, instead of a merely ignorant man, an
infidel philosopher.[115] For Faith alone can demonstrate
and make receivable the good that the carnal and animal man
cannot understand."

This gives the better Renaissance temper perhaps as well as anything to
be found, and may, or should in fairness, be set against the worser tone
of mere libertinage in which some even of the ladies indulge here, and
still more against that savagery which has been noticed above. This
undoubtedly was in Milton's mind when he talked of "Lust hard by Hate,"
and it makes Hircan coolly observe, after a story has been told in which
an old woman successfully interferes to save a girl's chastity, that in
the place of the hero he should certainly have killed the hag and
enjoyed the girl. This is obviously said in no bravado, and not in the
least humorously: and the spirit of it is exemplified in divers not in
the least incredible anecdotes of Brantome's in the generation
immediately following, and of Tallemant des Reaux in the next. The
religiosity displayed is of a high temper