To sum up, the sentiment of modesty neither originates in religion nor depends upon it; it is only very indirectly allied to it. Even from the point of view of modesty a religious education is not above reproach. Among Protestants, is the reading of the Bible always a good school? M. Bruston has contended for the propriety of reading the Song of Songs in an epoch like ours when marriages are often made out of interest rather than of inclination; and indeed we agree with him that the reading of the Song of Songs does tend to develop certain inclinations in young girls, but hardly an inclination to a regular and complicated church marriage. Among Catholics how many indiscreet questions the confessor puts to the young girl! How many prohibitions, as dangerous in their way as suggestions! And even in the item of modesty excess is a defect; a little wholesome liberty in education and manners would do no harm. Catholic education sometimes distorts the woman’s mind by making it too different from that of the man, and by accustoming it to a perpetual timidity and discomposure in the presence of the being with whom she must pass her life, and by rendering her modesty somewhat too indeterminate and savage, and converting it into a sort of religion. [Sidenote: True modesty.] There is also sometimes manifest a sort of perversion of modesty in the mystical tendencies of woman, which are especially strong at the age of puberty. These tendencies, exploited by the priesthood, give rise to convents and cloisters. A Catholic education too often constitutes for young girls a sort of moral mutilation; one endeavours to keep them virgins, and one succeeds in converting them into imperfect women. Religions are too inclined to consider the union of the sexes under I know not what mystical aspect, and, from the point of view of morals, as a stain. Certainly purity is a power; it is with a little diamond point that mountains, and even continents, are nowadays pierced, but Christianity has confounded chastity with purity. True purity is that of love, true chastity is chastity of heart; chastity of heart survives chastity of body, and stops at the point beyond which it would become a restriction, an obstacle to the free development of the entire being. An eunuch or a young man studying for the priesthood may well be destitute of chastity; the smile of a young girl at the thought of her fiancé may be infinitely more virginal than that of a nun. Nothing moreover stains the mind like a too exclusive preoccupation with the things of the body; incessant attention to them necessarily evokes a chain of immodest imagery. St. Jerome in his desert, believing, as he relates, that he saw the Roman courtesans dancing naked in the moonlight, was less pure in heart and brain than Socrates unceremoniously paying a visit to Theodora. A too self-conscious modesty is immodest. The whole grace of virginity is ignorance; the