After quoting these opinions it is, perhaps, not unnecessary to point out that, while sexual emotion constitutes the main reservoir of energy on which religion can draw, it is far from constituting either the whole content of religion or its root.  Murisier, in an able study of the psychology of religious ecstasy, justly protests against too crude an explanation of its nature, though at the same time he admits that “the passion of the religious ecstatic lacks nothing of what goes to make up sexual love, not even jealousy."[401]

Serieux, in his little work, Recherches Cliniques sur les Anomalies de l’Instinct Sexuel, valuable on account of its instructive cases, records in detail a case which so admirably illustrates this phase of auto-erotism on the borderland between ordinary erotic day-dreaming and religious mysticism, the phenomena for a time reaching an insane degree of intensity, that I summarize it.  “Therese M., aged 24, shows physical stigmata of degeneration.  The heredity is also bad; the father is a man of reckless and irregular conduct; the mother was at one time in a lunatic asylum.  The patient was brought up in an orphanage, and was a troublesome, volatile child; she treated household occupations with contempt, but was fond of study.  Even at an early age her lively imagination attracted attention, and the pleasure which she took in building castles in the air.  From the age of seven to ten she masturbated.  At her first communion she felt that Jesus would for ever be the one master of her heart.  At thirteen, after the death of her mother, she seemed to see her, and to hear her say that she was watching over her child.  Shortly afterward she was overwhelmed by a new grief, the death of a teacher for whom she cherished great affection on account of her pure character.  On the following day she seemed to see and hear this teacher, and would not leave the house where the body lay.  Tendencies to melancholy appeared.  Saddened by the funeral ceremonies, exhorted by nuns, fed on mystic revery, she passed from the orphanage to a convent.  She devoted herself solely to the worship of Jesus; to be like Jesus, to be near Jesus, became her constant pre-occupations.  The Virgin’s name was rarely seen in her writings, God’s name never.  ‘I wanted’, she said, ’to love Jesus more than any of the nuns I saw, and I even thought that he had a partiality for me.’  She was also haunted by the idea of preserving her purity.  She avoided frivolous conversation, and left the room when marriage was discussed, such a union being incompatible with a pure life; ’it was my fixed idea for two years to make my soul ever more pure in order to be agreeable to Him; the Beloved is well pleased among the lilies.’