The relationship of the sexual and the religious emotions—­like so many other of the essential characters of human nature—­is seen in its nakedest shape by the alienist.  Esquirol referred to this relationship, and, many years ago, J.B.  Friedreich, a German alienist of wide outlook and considerable insight, emphasized the connection between the sexual and the religious emotions, and brought forward illustrative cases.[391] Schroeder van der Kolk also remarked:  “I venture to express my conviction that we should rarely err if, in a case of religious melancholy, we assumed the sexual apparatus to be implicated."[392] Regis, in France, lays it down that “there exists a close connection between mystic ideas and erotic ideas, and most often these two orders of conception are associated in insanity."[393] Berthier considered that erotic forms of insanity are those most frequently found in convents.  Bevan-Lewis points out how frequently religious exaltation occurs at puberty in women, and religious depression at the climacteric, the period of sexual decline.[394] “Religion is very closely allied to love,” remarks Savage, “and the love of woman and the worship of God are constantly sources of trouble in unstable youth; it is very interesting to note the frequency with which these two deep feelings are associated."[395] “Closely connected with salacity, particularly in women,” remarks Conolly Norman, when discussing mania (Tuke’s Dictionary of Psychological Medicine), “is religious excitement....  Ecstasy, as we see in cases of acute mental disease, is probably always connected with sexual excitement, if not with sexual depravity.  The same association is constantly seen in less extreme cases, and one of the commonest features in the conversation of an acutely maniacal woman is the intermingling of erotic and religious ideas.”  “Patients who believe,” remarks Clara Barrus, “that they are the Virgin Mary, the bride of Christ, the Church, ‘God’s wife,’ and ’Raphael’s consort,’ are sure, sooner or later, to disclose symptoms which show that they are some way or other sexually depraved."[396] Forel, who devotes a chapter of his book Die Sexuelle Frage, to the subject, argues that the strongest feelings of religious emotion are often unconsciously rooted in erotic emotion or represent a transformation of such emotion; and, in an interesting discussion (Ch.  VI) of this question in his Sexualleben unserer Zeit, Bloch states that “in a certain sense we may describe the history of religions as the history of a special manifestation of the human sexual instinct.”  Ball, Brouardel, Morselli, Vallon and Marie,[397] C.H.  Hughes,[398] to mention but a few names among many, have emphasized the same point.[399] Krafft-Ebing deals briefly with the connection between holiness and the sexual emotion, and the special liability of the saints to sexual temptations; he thus states his own conclusions:  “Religious and sexual emotional states at the height of their development exhibit a harmony in quantity and quality of excitement, and can thus in certain circumstances act vicariously.  Both,” he adds, “can be converted into cruelty under pathological conditions."[400]