Consequently it is not surprising if we have found ourselves digging in somewhat unfamiliar places. Later on, the Catholic outlook spanned the whole imagination of the Middle Ages like the vaulted nave of a vast cathedral. By laying bare some of the foundations of that outlook and applying to them a little knowledge of the histories of words and their meanings, we can do something which we could hardly do else but by a long and difficult study of the arcana of the Dark Ages, their Neoplatonism, their monastic traditions, their Schools, and their cults of the Virgin. We can, in some degree, be present with our own imaginations at the building of the cathedral. And this is worth while, not only for its own sake, but because, as that huge edifice slowly ruined, we filched its worn but shapely stones and began to build up with them those bridges of feeling which join us to-day to our husbands and our wives, our children, our lovers, our friends. CHAPTER VII DEVOTION _Passion._ _Lady._ _Love-longing._ _Conscience._ _Inquisition._ _Authority._ _Individual._ _Influence._ Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present, and the future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic nations with the exhausted population of the south, impressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and institutions. The result was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among the consequences of these events. ... The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers; so that the earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art: _Galeotto fù il libro, e chi lo scrisse._—SHELLEY: _A Defence of Poetry_.