The thing that urged them on was the general fear in which the husband was held, the pressing need of attaining, ere it was too late, a good condition of defence and even of superiority. The rising spectre of marriage fascinated teacher and taught alike. At ten years of age, to tell the truth, such personages as Anne of France and Margaret of France had already disposed of their heart! so that to overwhelm them with work was believed the best way to protect them against themselves. “The craters of Etna, the forge of Vulcan, Vesuvius, Olympus cannot compare their fires to those of the temperament of a young girl inflamed by high feeding,” cries Vivès. The more effectually to extinguish these flames Vivès reinforces the regimen of work with a course of cold water and a vegetable diet, and this he austerely names “the perpetual fast” of the Christian life; he proscribes dancing, and counts on serious studies to preserve them from vanity and to widen the scope of their intellectual activities. In short, while more sharply accentuating the scientific note than Anne of France, he has the same end in view. Like her, he is convinced, passionately convinced indeed, that it is right to set a straight course for marriage, having now only a half-hearted belief in the old ideal of virginity: he has, further, so rooted a horror of vain sentimentalities, affectations, romances, poetry, all sensibility real or affected, that he throws overboard Italian and French for his pupils: he wishes them to have wills and energies of their own. But like a true Spaniard, an enthusiast and yet a Stoic, he loves these warm, ardent natures. He is a little like that lord-justice who in his official tone interrupted a too pertinacious advocate, but under his breath bade him continue. He shrinks from the flames, but sees in them the instrument of regeneration. These little girls of thirteen, inured to the reading of Scripture, tricked out with history and ethics, with Xenophon and Seneca, he sends forth to the conquest of the world, to fulfil their vocation as women. He hopes that their initiation into Biblical exegesis will lead them to construct a philosophical religion for themselves, and that they will attain a rational appreciation of Catholicism as the source of justice and knowledge, and the sole panacea for society. That is the gist of his preaching to the daughters of Isabella the Catholic. Did Luther himself probe nearer the heart of the matter, or outline a scheme more novel and more magnificent?