The curious contrasts and confusion of the standard of morality, arising from this striving against nature, are well illustrated by a homily of the thirteenth century against marriage, addressed to youthful nuns, which exhausts all the arguments that the ingenuity of the writer could suggest. On the one hand he appeals to the pride which could be so well gratified by the exalted state of virginity; he pictures the superior bliss vouchsafed in heaven to those who were stained by no earthly contamination, confidently promising them a higher rank and more direct communing with the Father than would be bestowed on the married and the widowed; he rapturously dwells upon the inward peace, the holy ecstasy which are the portion of those who, wedded to Christ, keep pure their mystic marriage vow; and his ascetic fervor exhausts itself in depicting the spiritual delights of a life of religious seclusion. Mingled inextricably with these exalted visions of beatific mysticism, he presents in startling contrasts the retribution awaiting the sin of licentiousness and the evils inseparable from a life of domestic marriage. With a crude nastiness that is almost inconceivable, he minutely describes all the discomforts and suffering, physical and mental, attendant upon wifehood and maternity, entering into every detail and gloating over every revolting circumstance that his prurient imagination can suggest. The license of Shakespeare, the plain speaking of Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the mediæval trouvères show us what our ancestors were, and what they were is easily explained when such a medley of mysticism and grossness could be poured into the pure ears of innocent young girls by their spiritual director.[872]