I am speaking of the unwisdom of assuming
all women to be perfect. Belisarius ruined himself and his people
by believing his own wife to be an honest woman."
"But chivalry," I argued, "has surely been of service to mankind?"
"To an immense extent," agreed the Philosopher. "It seized a
natural human passion and turned it to good uses. Then it was a
reality. So once was the divine right of kings, the infallibility
of the Church, for cumbering the ground with the lifeless bodies of
which mankind has paid somewhat dearly. Not its upstanding lies--
they can be faced and defeated--but its dead truths are the world's
stumbling-blocks. To the man of war and rapine, trained in cruelty
and injustice, the woman was the one thing that spoke of the joy of
yielding. Woman, as compared with man, was then an angel: it was
no mere form of words. All the tender offices of life were in her
hands. To the warrior, his life divided between fighting and
debauchery, his womenfolk tending the sick, helping the weak,
comforting the sorrowing, must have moved with white feet across a
world his vices had made dark.
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