=Description of Religious Eroticism by the Poets.=--The Swiss poet, Gottfried Keller, with his peculiar genius has described religious eroticism in an admirable way, especially in his seven legends. Read, for example, _Dorothea's Blumenkörbchen_ (Dorothea's little flower-basket), in which the terrestial lover of Dorothea ends by becoming jealous of her celestial lover, of whom she always speaks in the most exalted sentiments. Wherever she went she spoke in the most tender terms and expressed the most ardent desire for a celestial lover that she had found, who waited in immortal beauty to press her against his shining breast. When the wicked prefect had bound Dorothea on the gridiron under which was placed a slow fire, this hurt her delicate body, and she uttered smothered cries. Then her terrestrial lover, Theophilus, forcing his way through the crowd, burst her bonds and said with a sad smile, "Does it hurt you, Dorothea?" But when suddenly freed from all pain she immediately replied: "How could it hurt me, Theophilus? I lay on the roses of the lover I adore! This is my wedding day!" Keller shows us here, along with eroticism, the suggestive effect of ecstasy, which among martyrs, may reach the most complete anæsthesia. Goethe has also described erotico-religious ecstasy; for example, at the end of the second part of Faust, in the prayers addressed by certain anchorites to the queen of heaven. =Distinction Between Religion and the Ecstasy Derived from Eroticism.=--It would be quite false to maintain that religion in itself arises from sexual sensations. The terror of death and the enigmas of existence, the sentiments of human weakness and insufficiency of life, the want of consolation for all miseries, the hope of a future life, all play an important part in the origin of religions. On the other hand, it is necessary to recognize the considerable role of the erotic sexual factor in religious sentiments and dogmas, where on the one hand it leads to ardent fervor, while on the other hand it tyrannizes, especially by the exclusiveness of its residues transformed into dogmas, the natural expansion of the erotic sentiments which are so variable in individuals. One of the most difficult and important future tasks of social science toward humanity is, therefore, to set free sexual relations from the tyranny of religious dogmas, by placing them in harmony with the true and purely human laws of natural ethics. =Compensations.=--In the animal series we have seen that sentiments of sympathy are derived, in a general way, by phylogeny, from the sentiments of sexual attraction, and we often see in man a sexual love, deceived, despised or transfigured, seek compensation or idealization in the fervor or religious exaltation. The question naturally presents itself whether this compensation or this ideal is indispensable, and if other objects of a human and not mystical nature cannot take its place.