Among the most developed sentiments of women there are two which constitute the strength of their disposition to propriety: modesty, the dignity of their sex, and love, which is exclusive when it is true. But for these two powerful causes religious motives would always have weighed lightly with her. If religion exercises a great control over women, it is by taking possession of these two motives: the surest means of making women listen, and almost the sole means, is to awaken their love, or to appeal to their modesty: to give themselves or to refuse themselves are the two great acts which dominate their lives, and immorality among them generally increases directly with the diminution of their modesty. Thence arises a new and delicate problem, whether modesty, that compound of power and grace, is not rather a religious than a moral virtue, and if religion has maintained it, would it not disappear with the disappearance of religion, and be enfeebled by a religion increasingly scientific and, in a sense, positive? Note in the first place, that if the essence of all feminine virtue is modesty, as of all male virtue it is courage, that very fact constitutes an additional reason for doing everything in one’s power to make modesty independent of religion, in order that it may stand unaffected by the doubts which necessarily, in the modern world, will overwhelm the latter. Certainly modesty is capable of serving remarkably well as a safeguard for beliefs, and even for irrational beliefs; it always prevents one from pushing reason, as from pushing desire to the end, but there is a true and a false, a useful and a harmful modesty. The first, as we shall see, is not bound up with religion, either in its origin or in its destiny. [Sidenote: Origin of modesty.]