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The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire
The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire Author:James Weir Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART III. The Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire. That there exists a relationship between the cultivated ethical emotion, religious feelin... more »g, and the essentially natural physio-psychical function, sexual desire or libido, is a fact noticed and commented on by many thinkers and writers. The literature of the subject is, however, exceedingly fragmentary and disconnected, no author (as far as I have been able to determine) having devoted as much as one thousand words to the consideration of this very interesting psychical phenomenon. Hence, my data have been gathered from many sources, which are as diversified as they are numerous. Beyond a question of doubt, man becomes religiously enthused most frequently either early in life, when pubescence is, or is about tobe, established, or late in life, when sexual desire has become either entirely extinct or very much abated. Young boys and girls are exceedingly impressionable at, or just before, puberty, and are apt to embrace religion with the utmost enthusiasm. A distinguished evangelist declares that " men and women seldom or never enter into the kingdom of God after they have arrived at maturity. Out of a thousand converts, seven hundred are converted before they are twenty years old." 92 The Roman Catholic church is keenly alive to these facts, therefore requires the rite of confirmation to be administered, if possible, to its would-be communicants at, or before, the age of puberty. Of all the insanities of the pubescent state, erotomania and religious mania are the most frequent and the most pronounced. Sometimes they go hand in hand, the most inordinate sensuality being coupled with abnor- (92) B. Fay Mills, Sermon to Young Men and Young Women, at Owensboro, Ky., May 20, 1894. mal religious zeal....« less