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There he saw, blazing like torches on each side of the Virgin placed exactly opposite Saint Anna, the four Evangelists borne on the shoulders of the four greater Prophets Saint Matthew on Isaiah, Saint Luke on Jeremiah, Saint John on Ezekiel, Saint Mark on Daniel each stranger than the other, with their eyes like the lenses of opera-glasses, their hair in ripples, their beards like the up-torn roots of trees; excepting Saint John, who was always represented as a beardless youth in the Latin Mediæval Church, to symbolize his virginity; but the most grotesque of these giants' was perhaps Saint Luke, who, perched on Jeremiah's back, gently scratches the prophet's head, as if he were a parrot, while turning woeful, meditative eyes up to Heaven.
But Mary offered definite horizons. A bird in the hand. There was something exciting about Mary not to be encountered in the Junos and Aphrodites of his cabaret quests. Mary appeared virtuous and yet promised otherwise. She used frank words lust, chastity, virginity, sexuality. Charlie quivered.
At his age he was as much a novice in love as the lad that has just been furtively reading Faublas. Of women he had nothing to learn; of love he knew nothing; and thus, desires, quite unknown before, sprang from this virginity of feeling.
"A woman herself is the only legitimate possessor of her own body and her own health.... Just as it is a woman's private right, and most intimate concern, to present her virginity as her best gift to the chosen of her heart, so it is certainly a pregnant woman's own private concern if, for reasons which seem good to her, she decides to destroy the results of her action."
But the face of the woman advancing towards him suggested that she was not particular about the identity of the form emerging from the mists of time to rescue her from virginity. She looked as if she would have gladly surrendered that jewel to any freebooter in return for a passage in the ship of matrimony, and gone off flying the proud signal, "All's well."
In this work, then, there is a God the Father who is sending down the crown of virginity and humility upon the Madonna by the hands of some Angels who are round her, some of whom are playing various instruments.
Neither shall he go out of the sanctuary, nor profane the sanctuary of his God; for the crown of the anointing oil of his God is upon him: I am the LORD. And he shall take a wife in her virginity. A widow, or a divorced woman, or profane, or an harlot, these shall he not take: but he shall take a virgin of his own people to wife.
Instead of shrinking from the encounter, my brow contracted increasing indignation; and my voice grew louder, as I stood forth the champion of chaste virginity and sanctimonious wedlock! The scene, in the very critical sense of the phrase, was high comedy! It was well, Fairfax, they went no farther than Paris: had either of them only reached Turin I had been half undone!
For some reason unexplained, having selected his characters, which one may almost say exhibit every form of love except a wholesome and a human one, the author deemed it necessary that the whole should redound to the praise and credit of cloistral virginity and glozing 'honour, and whatever else of unreal sentiment the cynicism of the renaissance had grafted on the superstition of the middle age.
The old hackneyed ideal of virginity was in his eyes still surrounded by a sacred aureole; but no matter how often he discovered Mara in evil things, no matter how often he rejected her in his imagination, or tried with all the moral strength of his being to destroy her image in his mind, her face in its golden setting, her frail, white girlish body pierced through each curtain, each wall, each thought with which he strove to conceal the evil spirit that would not be exorcised either by prayers or curses.
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