across Europe, and those who saw in it a resurrection of the older gods and their secrets, unhesitatingly condemned it.  The doctrine of immortality had entirely supplanted the old Greek ideal of a complete earthly life for man, and all that was sensuous had come to be regarded as intrinsically sinful.  Thus we have for background a divided universe, in which there is a great gulf fixed between this world and the next, and a hopeless cleavage between the life of body and that of spirit.

In this connection we may also consider the women of the two plays.  Charles Lamb has asked, “What has Margaret to do with Faust?” and has asserted that she does not belong to the legend at all.  Literally, this is true, in so far as there is no Margaret in the earlier form of the play, whose interest was, as we have seen, essentially theological.  Yet Margaret belongs to the essential story and cannot be taken out of it.  She is the “eternal feminine,” in which the battle between the spirit and the flesh, between idealism and paganism, will always make its last stand.  Even Marlowe has to introduce a woman.  His Helen is, indeed, a mere incident, for the real bride of the soul must be either theological or secular science; and yet so essential and so poignant is the question of woman to the great drama, that the passage in which the incident of Helen is introduced far surpasses anything else in Marlowe’s play, and indeed is one of the grandest and most beautiful in all literature.

“Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burned the topless towers of Ilium? 
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

* * * * *

O, thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.”

Still, Marlowe’s motif is not sex but theology.  The former heretics whom we named had been saved—­Theophilus by the intervention of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Pope Sylvester snatched from the very jaws of hell—­by a return to orthodoxy.  That was in the Roman Catholic days, but the savage antithesis between earth and heaven had been taken over by the conscience of Protestantism, making a duality which rendered life always intellectually anxious and almost impossible.  It is this condition in which Marlowe finds himself.  The good and the evil angels stand to right and left of his Faustus, pleading with him for and against secular science on the one side and theological knowledge on the other.  For that is the implication behind the contest between magic and Christianity.  “The Faust of the earlier Faust-books and ballads, dramas, puppet shows, which grew out of them, is damned because he prefers the human to the divine knowledge.  He laid the Holy Scriptures behind the door and under the bench, refused to be called Doctor of Theology, but preferred to be called Doctor of Medicine.”  Obviously here we find ourselves in a very lamentable cul-de-sac.  Idealism has floated apart from the earth and all its life, and everything else than theology is condemned as paganism.