priests, who governed thought and conscience
almost without check, were vowed to perpetual chastity; that was held
up as the highest virtue. But gallantry has always marked the
soldier. This element of military life, inoculated with the fire of
imagination and the sanctity of the gospel, as happened in the poetic
atmosphere of priestly and feudal Provence, was transformed into that
pure, intense worship of woman which was sung by the Christian
troubadours, and admired and emulated alike by lords, minstrels, and
squires. For when the priesthood adopted the sons of war, and sent
them forth under Christian sanctions, they naturally imparted to
them, as far as possible, their own duties and sentiments. The result
was the knight, with his lyre, cross, and sword, mixture of poet,
warrior and saint; impersonating, in strange but beautiful union, the
military, the literary, and the ecclesiastic ideal, in which the
sensual flame fostered in the atmosphere of battle was blended with
the mental purity nourished by the exercises of the cloister, and
tempered with the rich fancy evoked under the stimulus of the
academy. Chivalry was the child of martial adventure and religious
faith, married by the culture of the Church. The gallant worship of
woman native to the camp, the poetic worship of woman created in the
court of minstrelsy, and the religious worship of woman set forth by
the Church in the apotheosis of the Virgin Mary, blent in chivalry,
produced that stainless and ardent devotion of the knight to his
lady, which was appropriated as at once the incitement and the reward
of brave and disinterested actions. Dipped in that pure pool of
sentiment which the Angel of Christianity stirred, the darts of Cupid
were cleansed from aphrodisiacs. The thought of a pure and lovely
woman was then naturally allied with the thought of Divinity; the
association of garter and star was not difficult.

The enthusiasm thus copiously generated, forbidden by the reigning
spirit and circumstances of the age to escape, either through the
vent of sensual indulgence, or through that of mere dreaming
sentimentalism, was forced to flow forth in the only remaining
channel, that of self-consecration to perilous adventures, glorious
services, feats of toil and penance. When arms and knight-errantry
fell out of fashion, in a more settled age, this force of enthusiasm,
no longer flashing forth in warlike emprise, illumined the saloon;
the current of feeling,