vement."[94]

[94] Spitzka: _Insanity_, p. 39.

Men, owing to their greater freedom, soon learn the difference of the
sexes and the delights of sexual congress; women, hedged in by
conventionalities and deterred by their innate passivity, remain, for
the most part, in ignorance of sexual knowledge until their marriage.
For this reason it happens that very many more women than men experience
religious emotion. _Young married men and women, who are in perfect
sexual health, and who have not experienced religion before marriage,
seldom give this emotion a single thought until late in life, when both
libido and vita sexualis are on the wane or are extinct._ Voltaire
cynically, though truthfully, observes that when woman is no longer
pleasing to man she then turns to God. A woman who has been disappointed
in love almost invariably seeks consolation in religion. The virtuous
unmarried woman, who has been unsuccessful in the pursuit of a husband,
invariably turns to God and religion with impassioned zeal and energy.

Ungratified, or, rather, _unsatisfied_, sensuality very frequently gives
rise to great religio-sexual enthusiasm. The circumcised foreskin of
Christ, where it was and what had become of it, was a source of
continual worriment to the nun Blanbekin; in an ecstacy of ungratified
_libido_, St. Catherine of Genoa would frequently cast herself on the
hard floor of her cell, crying: "Love! love! I can endure it no longer;"
St. Armelle and St. Elizabeth were troubled with _libido_ for the child
Jesus;[95] an old prayer is quite significant: "Oh, that I had found
thee, Holy Emanuel; _Oh, that I had thee in my bed to bring delight to
body and soul!_ Come and be mine, and my heart shall be thy
resting-place."[96] Francis Parkman calls attention to the fact that the
nuns sent over to America in colonization days were frequently seized
with religio-sexual frenzy. "She heard," writes he of Marie de
l'Incarnation, "in a trance, a miraculous voice. It was that of Christ,
promising to become her spouse. Months and years passed, full of
troubled hopes and fears, when again the voice sounded in her ear, with
assurance that the promise was fulfilled, and that she was, indeed, his
bride. Now ensued phenomena which are not infrequent among Roman
Catholic female devotees, when unmarried, or married unhappily, and
_which have their source in the necessities of a woman's nature_." (The
italics are my own.) "To her excited thought,