Such doctrines soon brought about a most serious perversion of the innate instincts of the human race. The senses of family and of society became so weakened that fanatical Christians were more than indifferent to their kinsmen and countrymen. One saint was venerated because he was hard and cruel only to his relatives. It is told of the Abbot Siseuss that on a believer asking to be received into the convent, he inquired if the suppliant had any one akin to him. “I have only a son,” said the Christian. “Well, then,” said the abbot, “take your son and cast him into the river, for thus only may you become a monk.” The father set about to do the bidding of the abbot, and it was only at the last moment that the order was recalled. For admission into a Christian community it was necessary to renounce one’s country.[22] Such ideas have struck a deep and enduring root. In the opinion of the ministers of the Scotch Church of the seventeenth century, according to Buckle,[23] there was nothing so surprising as that the earth could contain itself in the presence of that horrid spectacle, man, and that it did not gape, as in former days, to swallow him in the midst of his wickedness. For certainly, in the created universe, there could be nothing so monstrous and so horrible as man. It was to be expected that when such conceptions prevailed, celibacy and repudiation of the reproductive instinct should have been made obligatory on the clergy. The words, reported by St. Matthew (xix. 11, 12), that “there be eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” were interpreted by some as implying a voluntary renunciation of marriage, while others insisted on the literal meaning and in consequence mutilated themselves more or less completely. The breasts of women were removed to eradicate the maternal instincts. But it is only the sect of Skoptsy, by no means a small body in Russia, that applies the gospel command in this stringent fashion. The wish announced by St. Paul (Corinthians vii. 7), “I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I; but if they cannot contain, let them marry, for it is better to marry than to burn,” soon became a command, and since the fourth century the Catholic Church has advocated celibacy of the clergy, although it was not enforced until the eleventh century (under Gregory VII.). A low view of human nature has survived in the Catholic Church even to our own times. Pope Leo XIII., in his “Encyclical on Freemasons,” proclaimed it.[24] “Human nature,” he said, “was contaminated by the Fall, and as it is therefore much more prone to vice than to virtue, in order to attain virtue it is absolutely necessary to restrain the wild impulses of the soul, and to control the appetites by reason.”