e, renders her position peculiarly
liable to be affected disastrously by any failure of love. It must be
recognised that unbounded piety is often no more than a sex symptom,
proceeding from deprivation or from satiety of love, as also from
love's failure in loveless marriage. It seems to me that this
connection of the religious impulse with sexuality is a very important
thing for women to understand. In our achievement of facing the truth
in the place of evasions about fundamental things, lies the path, I
believe along which woman can escape, if ever she is to escape, from
the confusion of purposes that distract her at present.

The intimate association between religious ideas and feelings and the
sexual life is abundantly proved by the history of all peoples. We
first meet it in the widespread early practice of religious
prostitution, which has aptly been called "lust sacrifice." It is even
more manifest in the ancient religious erotic festivals. Of these we
have examples in the festivals of Isis in Egypt, in the Dionysian and
Eleusinian festivals of the Hellenes, in the Roman Bacchanalia and
festival of Flora, and among the Jews in the feast of Baal-peor. In
these festivals the frenzy of religious mysticism merges with the
wildest sexual licence. Sexual mysticism found its way also into
Christianity, a fact to which the lives of the saints furnish an
illuminating witness. And down to the present day we may notice its
manifestations in the most diverse sects during any period of
religious revival. We still meet with sexual excesses under the shadow
of faith, as, for instance, occurred in the late revival in Wales.

Havelock Ellis has laid stress on the leading significance of
religious sexual perceptions, and their special importance on the
emotional feminine character. This subject is so deeply connected with
women that I shall, I hope, be pardoned if I pause for a moment to
relate a personal experience which may help to make this truth more
clear.

In my girlhood I was strongly drawn to religion, partly through
training and example, but more, as I now know, by the affectability of
my strongly feminine temperament. My religious enthusiasm was so
intense that often I was in a condition which must have been closely
connected with erotic religious ecstasy. Salvation was the essential
fact of my life; seeking for it brought me the excitement I
unconsciously craved of conflicts and fulfilled desires. I sought for
God a