e
might not go in his lady's company." What, in fact, was Chivalry--which
Cervantes, intending to kill it, afterwards purified and Christianized
in _Don Quixote_--but a real though distorted religion, a hybrid between
paganism and Christianity, whose gospel perhaps was the legend of
Tristan and Iseult? And did not even the Christianity of the
mystics--those knights-errant of the spirit--possibly reach its
culminating-point in the worship of the divine woman, the Virgin Mary?
What else was the Mariolatry of a St. Bonaventura, the troubadour of
Mary? And this sentiment found its inspiration in love of the fountain
of life, of that which saves us from death.

But as the Renaissance advanced men turned from the religion of woman to
the religion of science; desire, the foundation of which was curiosity,
ended in curiosity, in eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of
good and evil. Europe flocked to the University of Bologna in search of
learning. Chivalry was succeeded by Platonism. Men sought to discover
the mystery of the world and of life. But it was really in order to save
life, which they had also sought to save in the worship of woman. Human
consciousness sought to penetrate the Universal Consciousness, but its
real object, whether it was aware of it or not, was to save itself.

For the truth is that we feel and imagine the Universal
Consciousness--and in this feeling and imagination religious experience
consists--simply in order that thereby we may save our own individual
consciousnesses. And how?

Once again I must repeat that the longing for the immortality of the
soul, for the permanence, in some form or another, of our personal and
individual consciousness, is as much of the essence of religion as is
the longing that there may be a God. The one does not exist apart from
the other, the reason being that fundamentally they are one and the same
thing. But as soon as we attempt to give a concrete and rational form to
this longing for immortality and permanence, to define it to ourselves,
we encounter even more difficulties than we encountered in our attempt
to rationalize God.

The universal consent of mankind has again been invoked as a means of
justifying this immortal longing for immortality to our own feeble
reason. _Permanere animos arbitratur consensu nationum omnium_, said
Cicero, echoing the opinion of the ancients (_Tuscul. Quaest._, xvi.,
36). But this same recorder of his own feelings confessed th