old Christian symbols, so often
translated, and so variously interpreted, present to the mind, at first
sight, too distinct a meaning. They are austere symbols of death and
mortification. The new one was far more obscure. This emblem, bloody
it is true, but carnal and impassioned, speaks much less of death than
of life. The heart palpitates, the blood streams, and yet it is a
living man who, showing his wound with his own hand, beckons to you to
come and fathom his half-opened breast.

The heart! That word has always been powerful; the heart, being the
organ of the affections, expresses them in its own manner, swollen and
heaving with sighs. The life of the heart, strong and confused,
comprehends and mingles every kind of love. Such a sentence is
wonderfully adapted to language of double meaning.

And who will understand it best? Women. With them the life of the
heart is everything. This organ, being the passage of the blood, and
strongly influenced by the revolutions of the blood, is not less
predominant in woman than her very sex.

The heart has been, now nearly two hundred years, the grand basis of
modern devotion; as sex, or a strange question that related to it, had,
for two hundred before, occupied the minds of the middle ages.

Strange! in that spiritual period, a long discussion, both public and
solemn, took place throughout Europe, both in the schools and in the
churches, upon an anatomical subject, of which one would not dare to
speak in our days, except in the school of medicine! What was this
subject? Conception. Only imagine all these monks, people sworn to
celibacy, both Dominicans and Franciscans, boldly attacking the
question, teaching it to all, preaching anatomy to children and little
girls, filling their minds with their sex and its most secret mystery.

The heart, a more noble organ, had the advantage of furnishing a number
of dubious though decent expressions, a whole language of equivocal
tenderness which did not cause a blush, and facilitated the intrigue of
devout gallantry.

In the very beginning of the seventeenth century, the directors and
confessors find a very convenient text in _The Sacred Heart_. But
women take it quite differently, and in a serious sense: they grow warm
and impassioned, and have visions. The Virgin appears to a country
girl of Normandy, and orders her to adore the heart of Mary. The
Visitandines called themselves the daughters of the _Heart of Jesus_