Here the appeal is to experience and testimony. His own experience may in the end be the surest teacher for every man; but meanwhile, to confirm or deny his instinctive anticipations and to start him on his way, testimony as to the experience of others, general experience, is of the most serious weight and value. We have had the testimony of Plato to the necessity of pureness, that virtue on which Christianity lays so much stress. Here is yet another testimony out of the same Greek world—a world so alien to the world in which Christianity arose; here is the testimony of Sophocles. “Oh that my lot might lead me in the path of holy _pureness_ of thought and deed, the path which august laws ordain, laws which in the highest heaven had their birth;...the power of God is mighty in them, and groweth not old.” That is the testimony of the poet Sophocles. Coming down to our own times, we have again a like testimony from the greatest poet of our times, Goethe; a testimony the more important, because Goethe, like Sophocles, was in his own life what the world calls by no means a purist. “May the idea of _pureness_” says Goethe, “extending itself even to the very morsel which I take into my mouth, become ever clearer and more luminous within me!” But let us consult the testimony not only of people far over our heads, such as great poets and sages; let us have the testimony of people living, as the common phrase is, in the world, and living there on an every-day footing. And let us choose a world the least favorable to purists possible, the most given to laxity—and where indeed by this time the reign of the great goddess Lubricity seems, as I have often said, to be almost established—the world of Paris. Two famous women of that world of Paris in the seventeenth century, two women not altogether unlike in spirit, Ninon de l’Enclos and Mme. de Sévigné, offer, in respect to the virtue with which we are now occupied, the most striking contrast possible. Both had, in the highest degree, freedom of spirit and of speech, boldness, gaiety lucidity. Mme. de Sévigné, married to a worthless husband, then a widow, beautiful, witty, charming, of extraordinary freedom, easy and broad in her judgments, fond of enjoyment, not seriously religious; Mme. de Sévigné, living in a society where almost everybody had a lover, never took one. The French commentators upon this incomparable woman are puzzled by this. But really the truth is, that not from what is called high moral principle, not from religion, but from sheer elementary soundness of nature and by virtue of her perfect lucidity, she revolted from the sort of life so common all round her, was drawn towards regularity, felt antipathy to blemish and disorder. Ninon, on the other hand, with a like freedom of mind, a like boldness and breadth in her judgments, a like gaiety and love of enjoyment, took a different turn, and her irregular life was the talk of her century. But that lucidity,