You have never seen a viler dung-hill." Such was the outcome of St.Bernard's cloistered _Meditationes Piissimae_.[45] Sometimes, indeed, these mediaeval monks would admit that the skin possessed a certain superficial beauty, but they only made that admission in order to emphasize the hideousness of the body when deprived of this film of loveliness, and strained all their perverse intellectual acumen, and their ferocious irony, as they eagerly pointed the finger of mockery at every detail of what seemed to them the pitiful figure of man.

St.Odo of Cluny--charming saint as he was and a pioneer in his appreciation of the wild beauty of the Alps he had often traversed--was yet an adept in this art of reviling the beauty of the human body.

That beauty only lies in the skin, he insists; if we could see beneath the skin women would arouse nothing but nausea.

Their adornments are but blood and mucus and bile.

If we refuse to touch dung and phlegm even with a fingertip, how can we desire to embrace a sack of dung ?[46] The mediaeval monks of the more contemplative order, indeed, often found here a delectable field of meditation, and the Christian world generally was content to accept their opinions in more or less diluted versions, or at all events never made any definite protest against them.
Even men of science accepted these conceptions and are, indeed, only now beginning to emancipate themselves from such ancient superstitions.