eritably in the flesh.... He extended Himself beside me, pressed me so
closely that I could feel His crown of thorns, and the nails in His feet
and hands, while He pressed His lips over mine, giving me the most
ravishing kiss of a divine Spouse, and sending a delicious thrill
through my entire body."[110]

Get rid of the narcotising effect of theological associations by
eliminating the name of Jesus and other religious terms from this case,
and from the others already cited, and no one would have the least doubt
as to their real nature. Given a condition of physical health in these
cases, with conditions that favoured social activity, healthy
intercourse with the opposite sex, culminating in marriage and
parenthood, can there be any doubt that this species of religious
ecstasy would have been non-existent? If, as Tylor says, the refectory
door would many a time have closed the gates of heaven, happy family
life would in a vast number of cases have prevented those religio-erotic
trances which have played so powerful a part in the history of
supernaturalism. Most people will agree with Dr. Maudsley:--

"The ecstatic trances of such saintly women as Catherine Sienne and St.
Theresa, in which they believed themselves to be visited by their
Saviour and to be received as veritable spouses into His bosom, were,
though they knew it not, little better than vicarious sexual orgasm; a
condition of things which the intense contemplation of the naked male
figure, carved or sculptured in all its proportions on a cross, is more
fitted to produce in young women of susceptible nervous temperament than
people are apt to consider. Every experienced physician must have met
with instances of single and childless women who have devoted
themselves with extraordinary zeal to habitual religious exercises, and
who, having gone insane as a culmination of their emotional fervour,
have straightway exhibited the saddest mixture of religious and erotic
symptoms--a boiling over of lust in voice, face, gestures, under the
pitiful degradation of disease.... The fanatical religious sects, such
as the Shakers and the like, which spring up from time to time in
communities and disgust them by the offensive way in which they mingle
love and religion, are inspired in great measure by sexual feeling; on
the one hand, there is probably the cunning of a hypocritical knave, or
the self-deception of a half-insane one, using the weaknesses of weak
women to ministe