Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/166

Rh strength should be sought in heaven and not on earth, Oisille discovers an occasion for piety in Boccaccio. And sometimes the use she makes of her scriptural knowledge is very strange indeed. A story of loveless, faithless marriage suggests the conclusion that "St. Paul wills not for married people to love each other much; for if our hearts be bound by an earthly affection, we are so much the farther from grace." And in another adventure, where a good wife laughs at her husband's infidelity, Oisille remarks: "She was not one of those against whom our Saviour speaks, saying, We have mourned and ye have not wept, we have piped and ye did not dance; for when her husband was sick she wept, and when he was merry she laughed. So all good women should share in their husband's good and evil, joy or sorrow; and serve him as the Church serves Jesus Christ." This quotation, as a quotation, might be taken as a caustic piece of sarcasm; but the peculiarity of the Heptameron is its union of an ideal of chivalry, honour, and religion, with an entire absence of the moral sense. Piety is an affair of the thoughts, the opinions, the ideas; possibly a matter for one's own personal life and soul. That it should attempt to regulate the lives of others would be to fall into the deadly sin of pride. Mystical as Margaret ever is, she is naturally lenient to the grosser sins; for all her esoteric dogmas go to prove, firstly, that the sins of the body are of small account compared with sins of the soul, such as pride and deadness of spirit; and secondly, that the soul exists only in its relations to the idea of God, and that it has no duties and no relations to the external world. The militant and responsible side of virtue is dead in such a soul.

Of the subjective, idealist, romantic side of virtue,