n, covetous, envious,
greedy, fickle, garrulous, stubborn, proud, vain, sensual, deceitful,
etc. "He who serves love, cannot serve God," he declared, "and God will
punish every man who, apart from matrimony, serves Venus. What good
could come from acting against the will of God?" Here we are face to
face with a grotesque position: the official Church favouring sexuality,
that is matrimony, as against the newer and higher standard of ascetic,
spiritual love. This attitude was quite logical, if not in the spirit of
religion and in contradiction to the principle of asceticism, yet in the
spirit of orthodoxy; for "whatever was not for her, was against her."
The brave, Janus-headed abbe was spokesman for the whole clergy, which
branded love not projected on God as _fornicatio_. In his recantation
Andreas upheld the previously-despised matrimonial state at the expense
of love; "love," he maintained, "destroys matrimony." Matfre did exactly
the same thing; after recapitulating in his _Breviari d'Amor_ all the
splendid achievements rooted in the cult of woman, he suddenly veered
round (at the 27,445th verse):

And Satan blows on their desire,
In monstrous flames leaps up the fire,
And maddened by the raging fiend,
From love of God and honour weaned,
They turn from their Creator's shrine
And call their mistresses divine.
With soul and body, mind and sense,
They worship woman's excellence.
Abandoned in her beauty revel,
And unawares adore the devil.

Three hundred years later the fanatical Savanorola stormed: "You clothe
and adorn the Mother of God as you clothe and adorn your courtesans, and
you give her the features of your mistresses!" which, as we shall
presently see, was literally true.

The clergy resisted all counsels of the _cortezia_ and _cavalaria_ with
the sure instinct desiring the continuance of existing conditions
rather than the victory of the higher conception. Some writers aver that
it was partly due to this fact that later on the cult of woman developed
into the cult of Mary. Again we are confronted by a process which in the
course of time has been repeated more than once: the spiritual-mystical
principle of Christianity entered upon a new stage, and took possession
of a new and important domain; but the Church, rigid and unyielding,
preferred clinging to a past lower stage rather than tolerating any
change. Had she been absolutely consistent, her greatest