A certain detachment from modern conditions, and from modern frames of mind, is essential to an adequate appreciation of what has been said. Looking at these events through the distorting medium of an altogether different social atmosphere, one is apt to attribute them to the operation of lawless desire, and so have done with it. This, however, is to overlook the fact that we are dealing with a society in which sexual symbols were common in religious worship, and in which theories of the religious life were propounded and accepted which to-day would be regarded as little less than maniacal. Unquestionably even then, once the situation had established itself it would be utilised by those of a coarser nature for mere sensual gratification. But practices such as we know existed, on the scale we have every reason for believing they were, could never have been had they not taken the form of an intense conviction. To assume otherwise is equal to arguing that because men have entered the Church from mere love of power or lust for wealth, the Church owed its establishment to the play of these motives. It is true that those who opposed these religio-erotic sects accused them of immorality, but it is the form these teachings assumed to the members of the impeached sects, not how they appeared to their enemies, that is important. Eroticism taught and practised as a religious conviction--that is the essential and significant feature of the situation. Not to grasp this is to fail to realise the vital fact embodied in the phenomena under consideration. We are not dealing with mere sensualists, even though we may be dealing with what is largely an expression of sensualism. It is sensualism expressed as, and sanctioned by, religious conviction that is the vital fact of the situation.