The enemies of Nature have not failed to pervert an instinct which they could not wholly suppress. That this suppression was actually attempted in the first outbreak of antinatural insanity is abundantly proved by the history of the early Christian sects, the Novatians, the Marcionites, and the followers of self-mutilating Origenes. Absolute abstinence from sexual intercourse was made the chief text of “unworldliness.” Novices were brought up in strict seclusion; mutilation was the usual penalty of violated vows, but was also practiced as an à-priori safeguard against the awakening of the sexual instinct. St. Clemens of Alexandria, one of the few semi-rational leaders of the patristic era, gives an appalling account of the consequences of those crimes against Nature, and vehemently denounces the fatuous dogma, which was nevertheless only modified, but never wholly renounced, by the moralists of a church whose ethics were undoubtedly derived from the physical nihilism of Buddha Sakiamuni. The Galilean apostle of Antinaturalism indirectly inculcates the superior merit of suppression in his allusions to “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” and the saints “who neither marry nor are given in marriage,” as well as in the example of his personal asceticism; and Paul distinctly informs us that marriage is only a lesser evil, a compromise with the passions of the unregenerate, which perfect virtue should forbear to gratify: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman; nevertheless to avoid ...,” etc. Such dogmas bore their natural fruit in the society-shunning fanaticism of hermits and anchorites; in aberrations à la Origenes, and in that dreadful source of unnatural vice, the enforced celibacy of monks and priests.