nem pacificam habet et haud absque injuria naturae
ejiceretur._

_Conjuges senes plerumque coeunt absque culpa, licet contingat semen
extra vas effundi; id enim per accidens fit ex infirmitati naturae._

_Quod si vires adeo sint fractae ut nulla sit seminandi intra vas
spes, jam nequeunt jure conjugi uti_ (vol. III, p. 317).

Such is the teaching of Chiniqui, the man whose courage and powerful
individuality succeeded in introducing abstinence from alcohol in
Canada. His long life was that of a pioneer and an inflexible champion
of social and moral reform in that country, based on Christianity. He
died at the age of ninety.

I have quoted the erotic precepts of the confessional from him, as I
was anxious to quote from an absolutely reliable source. It was not
with a light heart that Chiniqui abandoned the Catholic Church, but
only after violent and bitter struggles with conscience, struggles of
which he relates the tragic episodes, and which lasted for many years.

He commences the chapter from which we have quoted with the following
words: "Let legislators, fathers and husbands read this chapter and
ask themselves the question whether the respect which they owe to
their mothers, their wives and their daughters does not impose upon
them the duty of forbidding auricular confession. How is it possible
for a young girl to remain pure in mind after such conversations with
an unmarried man? Is she not more prepared for the depths of vice than
for conjugal life?" The author of these lines is a man who was obliged
for many years to be a confessor himself, and who understood to what
extent confession corrupted the sexual life of women and priests. It
is true that persons, priests or women, of strong character, and
especially those with a cold nature from the sexual point of view, may
resist such sexual excitation. But has confession been specially
instituted for this type of character? Every one who is not a
hypocrite will own that it is exactly the contrary.

=Religious Prudery.=--The results of such a combination of sexual life
with religious prescriptions are a mixture of ridiculous prudery and
continual eroticism. In certain convents (those of the nuns of
Galicia, for example) the nuns forbid their pupils to wash the sexual
organs, because it is improper! In Austria the nuns often cover the
crucifix in their bedroom with a handkerchief, "so that Christ cannot
see their nakedness"! But the convents of nuns, in the Middl