When we look for the causes of sudden and progressive religious exaltation we often discover that it is nothing else than compensation for disappointed love. I refer here to true and fervid exaltation, identified with the whole inner consciousness, and not to the religion of habit which the average man scarcely remembers in his daily life, and only observes on Sunday in the form of a conventional promenade, or a contribution to the church. This religion of habit is only an empty form, which awakes no sentiment, and consequently is associated with no sensation, even erotic, in its followers. In other individuals it may be otherwise, and certainly was so formerly. Everything goes to prove that the exalted sentiments of sympathy from which our religion is to a great extent derived, such as the holy fervor, the devotional ardor and the delights of ecstasy which it has so often procured for its followers and still procures for some of them, whether their object be God, Allah, Jehovah, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Vishnu, the Virgin Mary, or the Saints, that these sentiments have to a great extent their roots in primary erotic sensations and sentiments, or represent the direct transformation of them. It is needless to say that all this may take place quite unconsciously and with the purest intentions. I hasten to add that the majority of true religious sentiments come from quite a different source. When we study the religious sentiment profoundly, especially in the Christian religion, and Catholicism in particular, we find at each step its astonishing connection with eroticism. We find it in the exalted adoration of holy women, such as Mary Magdalene, Marie de Bethany, for Jesus, in the holy legends, in the worship of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages, and especially in art. The ecstatic Madonnas in our art galleries cast their fervent regards on Jesus or on the heavens. The expression in Murillo's "Immaculate Conception" may be interpreted by the highest voluptuous exaltation of love as well as by holy transfiguration. The "Saints" of Correggio regard the Holy Virgin with an amorous ardor which may be celestial, but appears in reality extremely terrestrial and human. Numerous sects, both ancient and modern, have entered on the scene in a hardly less libidinous manner; for example, the sexual excesses of the anabaptists in former times and the sexual ecstasies of certain modern sects in America.