=Asceticism is as old as human religion, and as widely diffused throughout the entire world.= We find individual ascetics among many savage peoples; ascetic sects, especially among the ancient and modern civilized races, in Babylon, Syria, Phrygia, Judæa, even in pre-Columbian Mexico, and most developed in India, in Islam, and in Christianity. The Indian samkhya-doctrine, demanding increased self-discipline, “yoga,” which was based upon the opposition between spirit and matter, led to the adoption of asceticism in Buddhism and in the religion of the Jains, also to the foundation of ascetic sects, such as the “Acelakas,” the “Ajivakas,” the “Suthrēs” or “Pure,” who, according to Hardy, “are in their life a disgrace to their name.” Yogahood attained its highest development among Sivaitic sects of the ninth to the sixteenth centuries; these alternated between uncontrolled satisfaction of the rudest sexual impulses and asceticism pushed to the point of self-torture. In Islam it was the sect of the Sufi in which the relation between sexuality and asceticism was especially manifest; but before this Christianity had developed asceticism into a formal system, and had deduced its most extreme consequences. To the early Christians, only the nutritive impulse appeared natural; the sexual impulse was debased nature; physical and psychical emasculation were actually recommended in the New Testament writings (_cf._ Matt. xix. 12). Already in the second century of the Christian era numerous Christians voluntarily castrated themselves, and in the fourth century the Council of Nicæa found it necessary to deal with the prevalence of this ascetic abuse, and with the predecessors of the modern “skopzen.”[57] Numerous ascetics and saints withdrew into solitude in order to attain salvation by castigation of the body. But it is very noteworthy that they almost all =lived and moved exclusively in the sexual=, and that, in the way already explained, they came to occupy themselves incessantly with all the problems of the sexual life. The writings of the saints are full of such references to the _vita sexualis_, and are, therefore, a valuable source for the history of ancient morals. Nothing was so interesting to these ascetics as the life of prostitutes and the sexual excesses of the impious. Numerous legends relate the attempts of the saints to induce prostitutes to abandon their profession, and to turn to a holy life, and the work of Charles de Bussy, “Les Courtisanes Saintes,” shows the result of these labours. St. Vitalius visited the brothels every night, to give the women money in order that they might not sin, and prayed for their conversion.