and
reliable character of the impugned letters.

The early Christian legends of chastity had, however, their successors.
_Aucassin et Nicolette_, which was probably written in Northern France
towards the end of the twelfth century, is above all the descendant of the
stories in the _Acta Sanctorum_ and elsewhere. It embodied their spirit
and carried it forward, uniting their delicate feeling for chastity and
purity with the ideal of monogamic love. _Aucassin et Nicolette_ was the
death-knell of the primitive Christian romance of chastity. It was the
discovery that the chaste refinements of delicacy and devotion were
possible within the strictly normal sphere of sexual love.

There were at least two causes which tended to extinguish the primitive
Christian attraction to chastity, even apart from the influence of the
Church authorities in repressing its romantic manifestations. In the first
place, the submergence of the old pagan world, with its practice and, to
some extent, ideal of sexual indulgence, removed the foil which had given
grace and delicacy to the tender freedom of the young Christians. In the
second place, the austerities which the early Christians had gladly
practised for the sake of their soul's health, were robbed of their charm
and spontaneity by being made a formal part of codes of punishment for
sin, first in the Penitentials and afterwards at the discretion of
confessors. This, it may be added, was rendered the more necessary because
the ideal of Christian chastity was no longer largely the possession of
refined people who had been rendered immune to Pagan license by being
brought up in its midst, and even themselves steeped in it. It was clearly
from the first a serious matter for the violent North Africans to maintain
the ideal of chastity, and when Christianity spread to Northern Europe it
seemed almost a hopeless task to acclimatize its ideals among the wild
Germans. Hereafter it became necessary for celibacy to be imposed on the
regular clergy by the stern force of ecclesiastical authority, while
voluntary celibacy was only kept alive by a succession of religious
enthusiasts perpetually founding new Orders. An asceticism thus enforced
could not always be accompanied by the ardent exaltation necessary to
maintain it, and in its artificial efforts at self-preservation it
frequently fell from its insecure heights to the depths of unrestrained
license.[77] This fatality of all hazardous efforts to