distracting and correcting and intellectually hardening influences of outside interests and pursuits which men have. If unmarried women chance to come, as by reason of those conditions they are apt to do, under the ignorant and misapplied zeal of unwise priests who mistake for deep religious feeling what is really morbid self-feeling springing at bottom from unsatisfied instinct or other uterine action upon the mind, the mischief is greatly aggravated. It were well if those who make it their business to guide the consciousness of mankind through the manifold changes and chances of life were to be at the pains to inquire how much supposed religious feeling may be due to physiological causes, before they sanction or enjoin a repeated introspection of the feelings. He whose every organ is in perfect health knows not he has a body, and only becomes conscious that he has organs when something wrong is going on; in like manner a healthy mind in the sound exercise of the functions is little conscious that he has feeling, and only gets very self-conscious when there is something morbid in the processes of its activity. The ecstatic trances of such saintly women as Catherine de Sienne and St. Theresa, in which they believed themselves to be visited by their Savior and to be received as veritable spouses into his bosom, were, though they knew it not, little else 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 the cross, is more fitted to produce in 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 fervor, have straightway exhibited the saddest mixture of religious and erotic symptoms--a boiling over with lust, in voice, face, gesture, under the pitiful degradation of disease. On such persons the confessional has had sometimes the most injurious effect, more especially in those churches which spring Romanism in their ritual, have not placed confession under the stringent regulations and safeguards with which the Roman Catholic church surrounds it. 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 feelings. On the one hand, there is probably the cunning of a hypocritical knave or the self-deceiving duplicity of a half-insane one, using the weaknesses of weak woman to minister to his vanity or to his lust, under a religious guise; on the other hand, there is an exaggerated self-feeling, rooted often in sexual passions, which is unwittingly fostered under the cloak of religious emotion,