Or what would they think of Saint Bernard expatiating in his third meditation on horrible physiological details to demonstrate the baseness of our carnal ambition and the foulness of our pleasures?  Or of Saint Hildegarde, who placidly discusses the various factors of such pleasures, Saint Vincent Ferrier freely dealing in his sermons with the sins of Onan and of Sodom, using the simplest language, and comparing confession to a purgative, and asserting that the priest, like a doctor, should examine the excreta of the soul and prescribe for it?

What reprobation would be poured on the splendid passage by Odo of Cluny quoted by Remy de Gourmont in his “Latin Mystique,” the passage where that terrible monk analyzes the attractions of woman, turns them over, eviscerates them, and flings them aside like a drawn rabbit on a butcher’s stall; and again on Clement of Alexandria, who sums the whole matter up in two sentences:—­

“I am not ashamed to name the parts of the body wherein the foetus is formed and nourished; and why indeed should I be, since God was not ashamed to create them?”

None of the great writers of the Church were prudish.  This mock-modesty which has so long stultified us dates actually from the ages of impiety, the period of paganism, the return on threadbare classicism which was known as the Renaissance; and see how it has developed since!  Its hot-bed and nursery ground lay in the lewd and gorgeous years of the so-called Grand-siecle; the virus of Jansenism, the old Protestant taint mingled with the blood of Catholics, and pollutes it still.

“It is very true!  And pretty results have come of this infection of decency!” Durtal burst out laughing as he thought of the cathedral at Chartres.

“Here,” said he to himself, “we reach the climax; pious imbecility can go no further.  Among the subjects in sculpture in the ambulatory of the choir there is a group representing the Circumcision, Saint Joseph holding the Infant while the Virgin has a napkin ready and the High Priest is preparing to operate.  And there has been a priest so modest, a divine so decorous as to regard this scene as licentious and to paste a piece of paper over the Child’s nakedness!

“The indecency of God, the obscenity of a new-born Babe is too much!

“Bah!” said he.  “The time has slipped away in all this meditation, and the Abbe will be waiting.”

He ran quickly downstairs and hurried across to the cathedral, where the Abbe Plomb was pacing to and fro in front of the northern porch, reciting his Breviary.

“The side where sinners and demons are figured is especially that of the Virgin, who saves those and crushes these,” said the Abbe.  “The northern porch of a church is usually the most lively of all; here, however, the Satanic incidents are on the southern side, because they form part of the Last Judgment represented over the south door.  Otherwise Chartres, unlike her sister cathedrals, would have no scenes of that kind.”