extend to the other. Nor is it surprising that
the two emotions should have a dynamic relation to each other, and that
the auto-erotic impulse, being the more primitive and fundamental of the
two impulses, should be able to pass its unexpended energy over to the
religious emotion, there to find the expansion hitherto denied it, the
love of the human becoming the love of the divine.

"I was not good enough for man,
And so am given to God."

Even when there is absolute physical suppression on the sexual side, it
seems probable that thereby a greater intensity of spiritual fervor is
caused. Many eminent thinkers seem to have been without sexual desire.

It is a noteworthy and significant fact that the age of love is also the
age of conversion. Starbuck, for instance, in his very elaborate study of
the psychology of conversion shows that the majority of conversions take
place during the period of adolescence; that is, from the age of puberty
to about 24 or 25.[385]

It would be easy to bring forward a long series of observations, from the
most various points of view, to show the wide recognition of this close
affinity between the sexual and the religious emotions. It is probable, as
Hahn points out, that the connection between sexual suppression and
religious rites, which we may trace at the very beginning of culture, was
due to an instinctive impulse to heighten rather than abolish the sexual
element. Early religious rites were largely sexual and orgiastic because
they were largely an appeal to the generative forces of Nature to exhibit
a beneficial productiveness. Among happily married people, as Hahn
remarks, the sexual emotions rapidly give place to the cares and anxieties
involved in supporting children; but when the exercise of the sexual
function is prevented by celibacy, or even by castration, the most
complete form of celibacy, the sexual emotions may pass into the psychical
sphere to take on a more pronounced shape.[386] The early Christians
adopted the traditional Eastern association between religion and celibacy,
and, as the writings of the Fathers amply show, they expended on sexual
matters a concentrated fervor of thought rarely known to the Greek and
Roman writers of the best period.[387] As Christian theology developed,
the minute inquisition into sexual things sometimes became almost an
obsession. So far as I am aware, however (I cannot profess to have made
any special investigation), it was not