nd make an
outcry. After some such brothel-contests, they are taken away, and
conveyed into a cavern, where they are forced to some work: but as their
smell is offensive, in consequence of having rent asunder the conjugial
principle, which is the chief jewel of human life, they are sent to the
borders of the western quarters, where at a certain distance they appear
lean, as if consisting of bones covered over with skin only; but when
seen at a distance they appear like panthers. When I was permitted to
see them nearer, I was surprised that some of them held books in their
hands, and were reading; and I was told that this is the case, because
in the world they said various things concerning the spiritual things of
the church, and yet defiled them by adulteries, even to their
extremities, and that such was the correspondence of this lust with the
violation of spiritual marriage. But it is to be observed, that the
instances of those who are principled in this lust are rare: certain it
is, that women, because it is unbecoming for them to prostitute love,
are repugnant thereto, and that repugnance enervates; nevertheless this
is not from any lust of violation.

* * * * *

THE LUST OF SEDUCING INNOCENCIES.

513. The lust of seducing innocencies is neither the lust of
defloration, nor the lust of violation, but is peculiar and singular by
itself; it prevails more especially with the deceitful. The women, who
appear to them as innocencies, are such as regard the evil of adultery
as an enormous sin, and who therefore highly prize chastity, and at the
same time piety: these women are the objects which set them on fire. In
Roman Catholic countries there are maidens devoted to the monastic life;
and because they believe these maidens to be pious innocencies above the
rest of their sex, they view them as the dainties and delicacies of
their lust. With a view of seducing either the latter or the former
because they are deceitful, they first devise arts, and next, when they
have well digested them, without receiving any check from shame, they
practise them as from nature. These arts are principally pretences of
innocence, love, chastity, and piety; by these and other cunning
stratagems, they enter into the interior friendship of such women, and
thence into their love, which they change from spiritual into natural by
various persuasions and at the same time by insinuations, and afterwards
into corporea