ictions, you will perhaps throw
them into despair; if, on the contrary, you completely excuse
them, you maintain them in a disorder from which they may,
perhaps, never emerge. Adopt a wise middle course, and, perhaps,
with God's aid, you may often cure them."

Under certain circumstances some Catholic theologians have
permitted a married woman to masturbate. Thus, the Jesuit
theologian, Gury, asserts that the wife does not sin "_quae se
ipsam tactibus excitat ad seminationem statim post copulam in qua
vir solus seminavit_." This teaching seems to have been
misunderstood, since ethical and even medical writers have
expended a certain amount of moral indignation on the Church
whose theologians committed themselves to this statement. As a
matter of fact, this qualified permission to masturbate merely
rests on a false theory of procreation, which is clearly
expressed in the word _seminatio_. It was believed that
ejaculation in the woman is as necessary to fecundation as
ejaculation in the man. Galen, Avicenna, and Aquinas recognized,
indeed, that such feminine semination was not necessary; Sanchez,
however, was doubtful, while Suarez and Zacchia, following
Hippocrates, regarded it as necessary. As sexual intercourse
without fecundation is not approved by the Catholic Church, it
thus became logically necessary to permit women to masturbate
whenever the ejaculation of mucus had not occurred at or before
coitus.

The belief that the emission of vaginal mucus, under the
influence of sexual excitement in women, corresponded to
spermatic emission, has led to the practice of masturbation on
hygienic grounds. Garnier (_Celibat_, p. 255) mentions that
Mesue, in the eighteenth century, invented a special pessary to
take the place of the penis, and, as he stated, effect the due
expulsion of the feminine sperm.

Protestantism, no doubt, in the main accepted the general Catholic,
tradition, but the tendency of Protestantism, in reaction against the
minute inquisition of the earlier theologians, has always been to exercise
a certain degree of what it regarded as wholesome indifference toward the
less obvious manifestations of the flesh. Thus in Protestant countries
masturbation seems to have been almost ignored until Tissot, combining
with his reputation as a physician the fanaticism of a devout believer,
raise