[70] For evidence of the practices of savages in this matter, see Appendix A to the third volume of these Studies, “The Sexual Instinct in Savages.”  Cf. also Chs.  IV and VII of Westermarck’s History of Human Marriage, and also Chs.  XXXVIII and XLI of the same author’s Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii; Frazer’s Golden Bough contains much bearing on this subject, as also Crawley’s Mystic Rose.

[71] See, e.g., Westermarck, Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii, pp. 412 et seq.

[72] Thus an old Maori declared, a few years ago, that the decline of his race has been entirely due to the loss of the ancient religious faith in the tabu.  “For,” said he (I quote from an Auckland newspaper), “in the olden-time our tapu ramified the whole social system.  The head, the hair, spots where apparitions appeared, places which the tohungas proclaimed as sacred, we have forgotten and disregarded.  Who nowadays thinks of the sacredness of the head?  See when the kettle boils, the young man jumps up, whips the cap off his head, and uses it for a kettle-holder.  Who nowadays but looks on with indifference when the barber of the village, if he be near the fire, shakes the loose hair off his cloth into it, and the joke and the laughter goes on as if no sacred operation had just been concluded.  Food is consumed on places which, in bygone days, it dared not even be carried over.”

[73] Thus, long before Christian monks arose, the ascetic life of the cloister on very similar lines existed in Egypt in the worship of Serapis (Dill, Roman Society, p. 79).

[74] At night, in the baptistry, with lamps dimly burning, the women were stripped even of their tunics, plunged three times in the pool, then anointed, dressed in white, and kissed.

[75] Thus Jerome, in his letter to Eustochium, refers to those couples who “share the same room, often even the same bed, and call us suspicious if we draw any conclusions,” while Cyprian (Epistola, 86) is unable to approve of those men he hears of, one a deacon, who live in familiar intercourse with virgins, even sleeping in the same bed with them, for, he declares, the feminine sex is weak and youth is wanton.

[76] Perpetua (Acta Sanctorum, March 7) is termed by Hort and Mayor “that fairest flower in the garden of post-Apostolic Christendom.”  She was not, however, a virgin, but a young mother with a baby at her breast.

[77] The strength of early Christian asceticism lay in its spontaneous and voluntary character.  When, in the ninth century, the Carlovingians attempted to enforce monastic and clerical celibacy, the result was a great outburst of unchastity and crime; nunneries became brothels, nuns were frequently guilty of infanticide, monks committed unspeakable abominations, the regular clergy formed incestuous relations with their nearest female relatives (Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy, vol. i, pp, 155 et seq.).