enfant terrible, declared that “natural law does not forbid masturbation,” but that proposition was condemned by Innocent XI.  The most enlightened modern Catholic view is probably represented by Debreyne, who, after remarking that he has known pious and intelligent persons who had an irresistible impulse to masturbate, continues:  “Must we excuse, or condemn, these people?  Neither the one nor the other.  If you condemn and repulse absolutely these persons as altogether guilty, against their own convictions, you will perhaps throw them into despair; if, on the contrary, you completely excuse them, you maintain them in a disorder from which they may, perhaps, never emerge.  Adopt a wise middle course, and, perhaps, with God’s aid, you may often cure them.”

Under certain circumstances some Catholic theologians have permitted a married woman to masturbate.  Thus, the Jesuit theologian, Gury, asserts that the wife does not sin “quae se ipsam tactibus excitat ad seminationem statim post copulam in qua vir solus seminavit.”  This teaching seems to have been misunderstood, since ethical and even medical writers have expended a certain amount of moral indignation on the Church whose theologians committed themselves to this statement.  As a matter of fact, this qualified permission to masturbate merely rests on a false theory of procreation, which is clearly expressed in the word seminatio.  It was believed that ejaculation in the woman is as necessary to fecundation as ejaculation in the man.  Galen, Avicenna, and Aquinas recognized, indeed, that such feminine semination was not necessary; Sanchez, however, was doubtful, while Suarez and Zacchia, following Hippocrates, regarded it as necessary.  As sexual intercourse without fecundation is not approved by the Catholic Church, it thus became logically necessary to permit women to masturbate whenever the ejaculation of mucus had not occurred at or before coitus.

The belief that the emission of vaginal mucus, under the influence of sexual excitement in women, corresponded to spermatic emission, has led to the practice of masturbation on hygienic grounds.  Garnier (Celibat, p. 255) mentions that Mesue, in the eighteenth century, invented a special pessary to take the place of the penis, and, as he stated, effect the due expulsion of the feminine sperm.

Protestantism, no doubt, in the main accepted the general Catholic, tradition, but the tendency of Protestantism, in reaction against the minute inquisition of the earlier theologians, has always been to exercise a certain degree of what it regarded as wholesome indifference toward the less obvious manifestations of the flesh.  Thus in Protestant countries masturbation seems to have been almost ignored until Tissot, combining with his reputation as a physician the fanaticism of a devout believer, raised masturbation to the position of a colossal bogy which during a hundred years has not