And Our Mother did not restrict herself to one mode only of expressing Her warnings and reproofs; to reiterate them she borrowed the language of other arts. Literature and the pulpit were inevitably the interpreters that she employed to vituperate the sins of the people. And they were not a whit more prudish or less audacious than sculpture. We have only to open the books of the Church to convince ourselves of the violent language in which she was wont to lash the sins of the flesh. Beginning with the Scriptures, the Bible itself--which no one dares read now but in mawkish French versions--what priest, for instance, would venture to recommend to the nerveless spirit of his flock the study of the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel or of the Song of Songs, that Epithalamium of Jesus and the Soul--down to the Fathers and the Doctors? How our modern Pharisees would reprove the uncompromising language of Saint Gregory the Great when he exclaims, "Speak the truth! A scandal is better than a lie;" or Saint Epiphanius' plain speaking in discussing the Gnostics and describing in detail the abominations of that sect, quietly adding in the face of the congregation, "Why should I shrink from speaking of the things you do not fear to do? By speaking thus, I hope to fill you with horror of the turpitude you commit." Or what would they think of Saint Bernard expatiating in his third meditation on horrible physiological details to demonstrate the baseness of our carnal ambition and the foulness of our pleasures? Or of Saint Hildegarde, who placidly discusses the various factors of such pleasures, Saint Vincent Ferrier freely dealing in his sermons with the sins of Onan and of Sodom, using the simplest language, and comparing confession to a purgative, and asserting that the priest, like a doctor, should examine the excreta of the soul and prescribe for it? What reprobation would be poured on the splendid passage by Odo of Cluny quoted by Remy de Gourmont in his "Latin Mystique," the passage where that terrible monk analyzes the attractions of woman, turns them over, eviscerates them, and flings them aside like a drawn rabbit on a butcher's stall; and again on Clement of Alexandria, who sums the whole matter up in two sentences:-- "I am not ashamed to name the parts of the body wherein the foetus is formed and nourished; and why indeed should I be, since God was not ashamed to create them?" None of the great writers of the Church were prudish. This mock-modesty which has so long stultified us dates actually from the ages of impiety, the period of paganism, the return on threadbare classicism which was known as the Renaissance; and see how it has developed since! Its hot-bed and nursery ground lay in the lewd and gorgeous years of the so-called _Grand-siecle_; the virus of Jansenism, the old Protestant taint mingled with the blood of Catholics, and pollutes it still.