easure among deserts, over precipices! You waste and weaken
more and more; and the weaker grows your wretched body, the more is it
worried by the devil. In woman especially these tyrants dwell, making
her blown and swollen. They fill her with an infernal _wind_, they
brew in her storms and tempests, play with her as the whim seizes
them, drive her to wickedness, to despair.

And not ourselves only, but all nature, alas! becomes demoniac. If
there is a devil in the flower, how much more in the gloomy forest!
The light we think so pure teems with children of the night. The
heavens themselves--O blasphemy!--are full of hell. That divine
morning star, whose glorious beams not seldom lightened a Socrates, an
Archimedes, a Plato, what is it now become? A devil, the archfiend
Lucifer. In the eventime again it is the devil Venus who draws me into
temptation by her light so soft and mild.

That such a society should wax wroth and terrible is not surprising.
Indignant at feeling itself so weak against devils, it persecutes them
everywhere, in the temples, at the altars once of the ancient worship,
then of the heathen martyrs. Let there be more feasts?--they will
likely be so many gatherings of idolaters. The Family itself becomes
suspected: for custom might bring it together round the ancient Lares.
And why should there be a family?--the empire is an empire of monks.

But the individual man himself, thus dumb and isolated though he be,
still watches the sky, still honours his ancient gods whom he finds
anew in the stars. "This is he," said the Emperor Theodosius, "who
causes famines and all the plagues of the empire." Those terrible
words turned the blind rage of the people loose upon the harmless
Pagan. Blindly the law unchained all its furies against the law.

Ye gods of Eld, depart into your tombs! Get ye extinguished, gods of
Love, of Life, of Light! Put on the monk's cowl. Maidens, become nuns.
Wives, forsake your husbands; or, if ye will look after the house, be
unto them but cold sisters.

But is all this possible? What man's breath shall be strong enough to
put out at one effort the burning lamp of God? These rash endeavours
of an impious piety may evoke miracles strange and monstrous. Tremble,
guilty that ye are!

Often in the Middle Ages will recur the mournful tale of the Bride of
Corinth. Told at a happy moment by Phlegon, Adrian's freedman, it
meets us again in the twelfth, and yet again in the sixteenth centur