In writing The Canterbury Tales, Chausser had to contend with Christian ideas about virtue representing itself as otherworldly grace. His characters, especially the female love interests, as a result of this idea, follow winding character arcs marked by purity and later introspection. Because the love interests are represented as almost perfect in appearance and grace, the development they undergo is an introspective one, where they undergo personal trials and eventually are reaffirmed in their belief. Oftentimes, their virtue is redefined from one of personal grace and beauty to one of inner belief and faith, which sometimes comes at the expense of their purity. In the Man of Law’s story, Constance is, like Emelye in Chausser’s earlier story, at first represented as pure in appearance and virtue. It is only through her eventual tribulations that she achieves a higher state of understanding. At the end of the Man of Laws, on page 209, at the last sentence of line 1155, Constance “Down on her knees falls she to ground; Weeping for tenderness blithe in heart, She praises God a hundred thousand times.” The story makes it clear that god has led her to this adoration of himself, through divine intervention on multiple occasions. This guidance towards grace appears numerous times in early Christian writings. This theme appears in the early Christian Hexaemeron, which on the bottom of the 2nd paragraph of page 124 in Medieval Philosophy, states that “The world was not conceived by chance or in vain and for the great advantage of all things… namely that is the school of rational souls and the training ground where they learn to know god. For it is through visible and sensible things that the mind is led, as by a hand, to the contemplation of invisible things.” The world that shapes the faithful people of the world is a training ground, and the world and tribulations that Chausser creates is representative of that training ground. While the Hexaemeron takes a strong stance on the idea of being taught and led on the path to Christ, Nicephorus the Solitary takes maybe an even stronger stance in his writings in the Philokalia. On page 32, at the top of the 2nd paragraph Nicephorus talks about how great doings and godliness must be taught, and is rarely given. He says that “therefore it is necessary to seek a teacher, who is not himself in error, to follow his instructions, and so learn to distinguish, in the matter of attention, defects and excesses of right end of left, countered through diabolical suggestion”. In the Canterbury Tales, this manifests itself in god himself, taking people who are already virtuous and graceful and teaching them, through tribulation, to look inward at their own faith and reflect. The diabolical suggestion, if taken as a broad example, was encountered by Constance throughout the Man of Law’s story. From the thief who attempts to have his way with her to her own despair at her own situation, the “teacher” that the novel provides is god himself, who shows her, at the end of the novel, the beauty of faith itself.