To honour Nature never rest,
By labour is she honoured best;
If others goods are in your hands,
Restore them all—so God commands.
From murder let all men abstain;
Spotless keep hands, and mouth keep clean.
Be loyal and compassionate,
So shall ye pass the heavenly gate.'
The one thing insisted on by Jean de Meung is the absolute necessity of a pure life. A profound sense of the beauty of a pure life is, indeed, the key-note to all mediæval heresies and religious excitements.[57] The uncleanness of the clergy was the most terrible weapon wielded by the heresiarchs. Thus Peter de Brueys compelled monks to marry. Henry the Deacon taught that the Church could exist without priests. Tanchelin of Antwerp held that the validity of the sacraments depended on the holiness of him who administered them. Peter Waldo sent out his disciples two by two, to preach the subversive doctrine that every virtuous man was his own priest; while the Cathari went gladly to the stake in defence of their principle that absolute personal purity was the one thing acceptable to God. The more ignorant the age, the wider is religious speculation; but in the most ignorant ages, there rises up from time to time a figure with a spiritual insight far beyond that of more learned times. Protestantism in its noblest form has found nothing more sublime than this conception of a Church where every good man is a priest; and there is nothing in the history of religious thought more saddening than these efforts of the people, ever hopeless, ever renewed, to protest against dogma, creed, perfunctory and vicarious religion, and to proclaim a religion of personal holiness alone.
Let us turn to the second division. We find the book teeming with a misogyny, bitter enough to make us believe that there must have been some personal cause for it. 'What is love?' he asks. 'It is a maladie de pensée—the dream of a sick fancy.... There is a far higher and nobler thing in the friendship of men.' And it is after narrating the stories of 'Penelope' and 'Lucretia,' that he puts into the mouth of Jealousy the famous couplet—