even by castration, the most complete form of celibacy, the sexual emotions may pass into the psychical sphere to take on a more pronounced shape.[386] The early Christians adopted the traditional Eastern association between religion and celibacy, and, as the writings of the Fathers amply show, they expended on sexual matters a concentrated fervor of thought rarely known to the Greek and Roman writers of the best period.[387] As Christian theology developed, the minute inquisition into sexual things sometimes became almost an obsession.  So far as I am aware, however (I cannot profess to have made any special investigation), it was not until the late Middle Ages that there is any clear recognition of the fact that, between the religious emotions and the sexual emotions, there is not only a superficial antagonism, but an underlying relationship.  At this time so great a theologian and philosopher as Aquinas said that it is especially on the days when a man is seeking to make himself pleasing to God that the Devil troubles him by polluting him with seminal emissions.  With somewhat more psychological insight, the wise old Knight of the Tower, Landry, in the fourteenth century, tells his daughters that “no young woman, in love, can ever serve her God with that unfeignedness which she did aforetime.  For I have heard it argued by many who, in their young days, had been in love that, when they were in the church, the condition and the pleasing melancholy in which they found themselves would infallibly set them brooding over all their tender love-sick longings and all their amorous passages, when they should have been attending to the service which was going on at the time.  And such is the property of this mystery of love that it is ever at the moment when the priest is holding our Saviour upon the altar that the most enticing emotions come.”  After narrating the history of two queens beyond the seas who indulged in amours even on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, at midnight in their oratories, when the lights were put out, he concludes:  “Every woman in love is more liable to fall in church or at her devotion than at any other time.”

The connection between religious emotion and sexual emotion was very clearly set forth by Swift about the end of the seventeenth century, in a passage which it may be worth while to quote from his “Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit.”  After mentioning that he was informed by a very eminent physician that when the Quakers first appeared he was seldom without female Quaker patients affected with nymphomania, Swift continues:  “Persons of a visionary devotion, either men or women, are, in their complexion, of all others the most amorous.  For zeal is frequently kindled from the same spark with other fires, and from inflaming brotherly love will proceed to raise that of a gallant.  If we inspect into the usual process of modern courtship, we shall find it to consist in a devout turn of the