ost religious matters, has been made
allegorical and applied to the Christian Church, but it was and will
always remain an erotic poem.

It is hardly necessary to add that natural eroticism very often leads
the severe and ascetic preachers of morality to the grossest
hypocrisy. Priests and other pious persons often preach an idealized
asceticism, while in secret they commit the most disgusting sexual
excesses.

We must not, however, judge such crying inconsistencies too severely;
they are to a great extent unconscious and are the result of the shock
of passion against the tyranny of dogma, prejudice, and public
opinion. They are often also the result of mental anomalies. When
science is allowed to enlighten sexual life freely and openly, the
hypocrisy of normal people will cease, and that of the abnormal will
be recognized in time and prevented from doing harm.

=Transformation of Eroticism into Religious Sentiment.=--In ordinary
life we find everywhere traces of the mixture of religion with sexual
sensations and images. The religious ceremonies of marriage among all
peoples constitute a significant remnant thereof.

When we look for the causes of sudden and progressive religious
exaltation we often discover that it is nothing else than compensation
for disappointed love. I refer here to true and fervid exaltation,
identified with the whole inner consciousness, and not to the religion
of habit which the average man scarcely remembers in his daily life,
and only observes on Sunday in the form of a conventional promenade,
or a contribution to the church. This religion of habit is only an
empty form, which awakes no sentiment, and consequently is associated
with no sensation, even erotic, in its followers.

In other individuals it may be otherwise, and certainly was so
formerly. Everything goes to prove that the exalted sentiments of
sympathy from which our religion is to a great extent derived, such as
the holy fervor, the devotional ardor and the delights of ecstasy
which it has so often procured for its followers and still procures
for some of them, whether their object be God, Allah, Jehovah, Jesus
Christ, Buddha, Vishnu, the Virgin Mary, or the Saints, that these
sentiments have to a great extent their roots in primary erotic
sensations and sentiments, or represent the direct transformation of
them.

It is needless to say that all this may take place quite unconsciously
and with the purest intentions. I hasten