Religious enthusiasm in itself cannot justly be termed an evil. Rather does it embody the most healthy and preservative development of our social forces. Like many other tendencies of the mind, it is subject to exaggeration, misapplication, and a predominance of the emotions over the intellect. The typical cases of religious insanity directly developable from sectarian and even undenominational religious enthusiasm, from religious meditations, exercises, devotions, or superstitions, are by no means so common as they are supposed to be by the uninitiated observer. The true point lies in this, that very many mental cases bear a strongly marked religious or at least moral aspect. The psychology of the subject will show, for example, that acute depression--a predominant phase of abnormal emotional life--leads almost necessarily to a religious interpretation. And this is even more the case with many actual sense perversions. Such, I mean, as have ever been associated with the ideas of the supernatural. These are not necessarily caused by religious over-excitement or enthusiasm. They may assume the appearance of it, because, being the deepest and most real feelings, desires, and convictions of the perverted organic life or of the moral reaction which accompanies it, they cannot well be expressed or described except in strong moral terms. Over and over again does this appear, and often among those least likely to be suspected of any religious predisposition. That these feelings should be clothed according to the prevailing ideas and creed of the patient is an essential reproduction of the mind. But, after all, this only relates to the form of their appearance, and there are many things which lie deeper. Religious excitement is not infrequently assigned as a cause of insanity. The writer has stated elsewhere his belief that the philosophy of the infinite, far from being a source of aberrations of thought which may be deemed insane, is the ultimate point of our mental evolution, and that a true and philosophical religion raises the mind above a mere incidental emotionalism and gives stability. With no religion and no moral obligation the organism is apt to become a prey to the lusts of the flesh and their consequences. Gasquet observes that religion may either produce or tend to hinder unsoundness of mind; that it may cause certain symptoms of insanity or modify them; and, lastly, that it may be employed as a means of moral prevention and treatment. He believes that every form of religion, however widely it may differ from our standard of the truth, if it enforces the precepts of morality, is a source of strength to the sound mind that sincerely accepts it.