To take a further step in the same direction, it is curious that in the lives of the Saints, those who spent their whole earthly existence in abstinence, works of the severest penance, and mortifications of the flesh, the tendency of demoniac influence was never in the direction of Sabbath breaking, profanity, idolatry, robbery, murder and covetousness, but always exerted itself to the fullest extent of its power in attacks upon chastity.  All other visions were absent in the hair-shirted, and self-scourgings brought out nothing but sexual idealities, sensual temptations.  The reason for this peculiarity is not far to seek.  What is dominant in the minds always finds egress when a favorable opportunity is presented, and the very thought of unchastity as something to be avoided, leads to its contemplation, or its creation in the form of temptation.  The virtue of chastity was the one law, and its observances and violations were studied from every point of view, and its numberless permissible and forbidden limitations expatiated upon to such a degree, that he who escaped them altogether could well attribute the result to the interposition of some supernatural power, the protection of some celestial guardian.  One is reminded of the expression of St. Paul:  “I had not known lust had the law not said:  thou shalt not covet.”  Lord Beaconsfield’s opinion was, that excessive piety led to sexual disorders.

According to Ninon’s philosophy, whatever tended to propagate immoderation in the sexual relations was rigidly eliminated, and chastity placed upon the same plane and in the same grade as other moral precepts, to be wisely controlled, regulated, and managed.  She put all her morality upon the same plane, and thereby succeeded in equalizing corporeal pleasure, so that the entire scale of human acts produced a harmonious equality of temperament, whence goodness and virtue necessarily followed, the pathway being unobstructed.

It is too much to be expected, or even to be hoped for, that there will ever be any unanimity among moral reformers, or any uniformity in their standards of moral excellence.  The educated world of the present day, reading between the lines of ancient history, and some that is not so very ancient, see ambition for place and power as the moving cause, the inspiration behind the great majority of revolutions, and they have come to apply the same construction to the great majority of moral agitations and movements for the reform of morals and the betterment of humanity, with pecuniary reward or profit, however, added as the sine qua non of maintaining them.

Cure the agitation by removing the occasion for it, and Othello’s occupation would be gone; hence, the agitation continues.  As an eminent theologian declared with a conviction that went home to a multitude, at the Congress of Religions, when the Columbian Exposition was in operation: 

“If all the religions in the world are to be merged into one, who, or what will support the clergy that will be deprived of their salaries by the change in management?”