142 THE GREAT SECRET
religious devotion, like Louise de Ia Vallièrc and like de Rancé, without intending to torture the body to relieve the agony of the soul.
Above all, it has to be understood that, as far as human sentiments are concerned, the absolute is an ideal which is never realized here below; all beauty alters and all life melts away; in short, everything passes with a marvellous rapidity; beautiful Helen has become a toothless skull, then a handful of dust, then nothing.
Any love which one cannot or should not declare is fatal love. There is no legitimacy in the passions outside the laws of nature and society. They must be exterminated at birth and suppressed with this axiom, ‘That which must nor exist does noiexist’. Nothing will ever excuse incest or adultery. These arc shameful things, offensive to chaste ears even in name, and the pure must not allow their existence. Acts which are unjustified by reason are not human acts, they are bestial and foolish. They are falls from which one must recover, falls whose stains must be removed; they are acts of depravity which decency must hide, which morals, cleansed by the magnetic breeze, must not admit even to punish them. Look at Jesus, in the presence of the woman taken in adultery. He did not listen to those who accused her, he did not look at her so as not to see her blushes, and when they kept on pressing Him to judge her, He answered with these wonderful words which would be the end of all penalties imposed by human justice, if their meaning were not that certain acts must remain unrecognized and as it were impossible before the modesty of the law: ‘Neither do I condemn thee, go and sin no more.
This is how our sublime Master spoke to the unhappy woman whose accusers He had refused to hear.
Jesus does not use the word adultery; He calls it fornication, and for punishment He allows a man to send away his wife.
The wife, for her part, has the right to leave the husband who has deceived her. Then, if she has no children, she becomes free again before nature; but, if she is a mother, she loses her rights in her children by her husband, at least if he is not a notorious scoundrel. In renouncing him, she renounces her children; and if she has not the melancholy courage to leave them and lose their regards she must resign herself to the heroism of maternal
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