s. IV and VII of Westermarck's _History of Human
Marriage_, and also Chs. XXXVIII and XLI of the same author's _Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. ii; Frazer's _Golden Bough_ contains
much bearing on this subject, as also Crawley's _Mystic Rose_.

[71] See, e.g., Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_,
vol. ii, pp. 412 et seq.

[72] Thus an old Maori declared, a few years ago, that the decline of his
race has been entirely due to the loss of the ancient religious faith in
the _tabu_. "For," said he (I quote from an Auckland newspaper), "in the
olden-time our _tapu_ ramified the whole social system. The head, the
hair, spots where apparitions appeared, places which the _tohungas_
proclaimed as sacred, we have forgotten and disregarded. Who nowadays
thinks of the sacredness of the head? See when the kettle boils, the young
man jumps up, whips the cap off his head, and uses it for a kettle-holder.
Who nowadays but looks on with indifference when the barber of the
village, if he be near the fire, shakes the loose hair off his cloth into
it, and the joke and the laughter goes on as if no sacred operation had
just been concluded. Food is consumed on places which, in bygone days, it
dared not even be carried over."

[73] Thus, long before Christian monks arose, the ascetic life of the
cloister on very similar lines existed in Egypt in the worship of Serapis
(Dill, _Roman Society_, p. 79).

[74] At night, in the baptistry, with lamps dimly burning, the women were
stripped even of their tunics, plunged three times in the pool, then
anointed, dressed in white, and kissed.

[75] Thus Jerome, in his letter to Eustochium, refers to those couples who
"share the same room, often even the same bed, and call us suspicious if
we draw any conclusions," while Cyprian (_Epistola_, 86) is unable to
approve of those men he hears of, one a deacon, who live in familiar
intercourse with virgins, even sleeping in the same bed with them, for, he
declares, the feminine sex is weak and youth is wanton.

[76] Perpetua (_Acta Sanctorum_, March 7) is termed by Hort and Mayor
"that fairest flower in the garden of post-Apostolic Christendom." She was
not, however, a virgin, but a young mother with a baby at her breast.

[77] The strength of early Christian asceticism lay in its spontaneous and
voluntary character. When, in the ninth century, the Carlovingians
attempted to enforce monastic and clerical celibacy, the r