great spirits of antiquity, by Sappho and Lucretius. In a page of St. Augustine one finds the expression of a franker and more profound ardour than in all the elegant affectations of Horace or the languors of Tibullus. Nothing in pagan antiquity is comparable to the chapter in the “Imitation” on love. The passion, confined and held in check, mounts to heights till then unknown, like a dammed river; but it is no less genuinely itself. What shall we say of the visionary mystics of the people like St. Theresa, and Chantal, and Guyon? Among them piety, in its most exaggerated form, verges upon the madness of love. St. Theresa might have been a courtesan of genius equally as well as a saint. Physiologists and physicians have often observed, in our days, analogous pathological cases, in which the religious effusion is simply, so to speak, a case of mistake in identity.[50] [50] Ribot, _de l’Hérédité_, 364; Moreau de Tours, _Psych. morbide_, 259. [Sidenote: Worship of Christ to a considerable extent a perversion of love.] In Christianity the conception of Jesus, the beautiful, gentle young man, the Holy Spirit incarnate in the purest and most ideal form, favours more directly than any corresponding conception in any rival religion this particular perversion of love. Christianity is the most anthropomorphic belief in existence, for it is the one of all others which, after having conceived the most elevated idea of God, abases it, without degrading it, to the most human of human conditions. By a much more refined, much more profound paganism than the paganism of antiquity, the Christian religion has succeeded in making God the object of an ardent love, without ceasing to make Him an object of respect. By a myth much more seductive and poetic even than that of Psyche, we see God, the true God, descended upon earth in the form of a blond and smiling young man; we hear him speak low in the ear of Mary Magdalene at the fall of evening; and then this vision suddenly disappears and we see in the gathering shadow two mutilated arms extended toward us, and a heart which bleeds for humanity. In this legend all the powers of the imagination are called in play, all the fibres of the heart are moved; it is an accomplished work of art. What is there astonishing in the fact that Christ has been and is still the great seducer of souls? In the ears of a young girl his name appeals at once to all her instincts, even to the maternal instinct, for Jesus is often represented as a child with the dimpled, rosy cheeks which the Greeks ascribed to Eros. The heart of the woman is thus besieged on all sides at once: her wavering and timid imagination wanders from the cherub to the youth, and from the youth to the pale figure, with the bowed head, upon the cross. It is possible that from the birth of Christianity down to the present day there has not been one single woman of an exalted piety whose heart has not first beat for her God,