sincerity; and fear rather than love ruled the Christian world.  Hence the austerity of convent life.  Its piety centred in the perpetual crucifixion of the body, in the suppression of desires and pleasures which are perfectly innocent.  The highest ideal of Christian life, according to convent rules, was a living and protracted martyrdom, and in some cases even the degradation of our common humanity.  Christianity nowhere enjoins the eradication of passions and appetites, but the control of them.  It would not mutilate and disfigure the body, for it is a sacred temple, to be made beautiful and attractive.  On the other hand the Middle Ages strove to make the body appear repulsive, and the most loathsome forms of misery and disease to be hailed as favorite modes of penance.  And as Christ suffered agonies on the cross, so the imitation of Christ was supposed to be a cheerful and ready acceptance of voluntary humiliation and bodily torments,—­the more dreadful to bear, the more acceptable to Deity as a propitiation for sin.  Is this statement denied?  Read the biographies of the saints of the Middle Ages.  See how penance, and voluntary suffering, and unnecessary exposure of the health, and eager attention to the sick in loathsome and contagious diseases, and the severest and most protracted fastings and vigils, enter into their piety; and how these extorted popular admiration, and received the applause and rewards of the rulers of the Church.  I never read a book which left on my mind such repulsive impressions of mediaeval piety as the Life of Catherine of Sienna, by her confessor,—­himself one of the great ecclesiastical dignitaries of the age.  I never read anything so debasing and degrading to our humanity.  One turns with disgust from the narration of her lauded penances.

So we see in the Church of the Middle Ages—­the Church of Saint Theresa—­two great ideas struggling for the mastery, yet both obscured and perverted:  faith in a crucified Redeemer, which gave consolation and hope; and penance, rather than repentance, which sought to impose the fetters of the ancient spiritual despotisms.  In the early Church, faith and repentance went hand in hand together to conquer the world, and to introduce joy and peace and hope among believers.  In the Middle Ages, faith was divorced from repentance, and took penance instead as a companion,—­an old enemy; so that there was discord in the Christian camp, and fears returned, and joys were clouded.  Sometimes faith prevailed over penance, as in the monastery of Bec, where Anselm taught a cheerful philosophy,—­or in the monastery of Clairvaux, where Bernard lived in seraphic ecstasies, his soul going out in love and joy; and then again penance prevailed, as in those grim retreats where hard inquisitors inflicted their cruel torments.  But penance, on the whole, was the ruling power, and cast over society its funereal veil of dreariness and fear.  Yet penance, enslaving as it was, still clung to the infinite value of the