While there was only unindividualised sexual instinct, the chastity of woman was of no account; we have seen that neither the Eastern nations nor the Greeks attached any value to it. The woman who had best fulfilled her vocation as a mother, was the woman most highly respected. In the East, as well as with Jews and Romans, a woman could be divorced by her husband for sterility. The only women who were, to some extent, appreciated for their own sakes, were the Greek hetaerae. But when asceticism became a moral value, chastity, too, was regarded as a virtue, and personal love between two individuals invested it with a profound significance. Henceforth woman should no longer be regarded as the vehicle for the gratification of male sensuality; it should be her mission to lead the lover to spiritual perfection. The fusion of the older ideal of womanhood, the mother (acknowledged and sanctioned by religion in the mother of the Saviour), with the newer ideal, the Virgin, created the ideal of the late Middle Ages: the virgin with the Child. Here the natural vocation of woman and the fantastic mission laid upon her by man were united in a paradoxical higher intuition, and it is superfluous to point out that the most irreligious minds of the Renascence, as well as those of all later eras, have to this day worshipped this ideal, and never wearied of representing it under new forms. But the worship of the Virginal Mother contains another element, an element of which man in his contact with woman is deeply conscious: the element of mystery. To a man a young girl, untouched by the faintest breath of sensuality, has a quality of strangeness and mysteriousness (this is probably a result of European sentiment), and at all times the woman who has become a mother has been regarded with a slight feeling of superstitious awe. In the Virginal Mother these two vaguely reverential feelings are blended; she is a strange and awe-inspiring being, and man, divining a mystery, bows down before her.