Vive Jésus en tous mes pas,
Vivent ses amoureux appas!
Vive Jésus, lorsque sa bouche
D’un baiser amoureux me touche!
Vive Jésus quand ses blandices
Me comblent de chastes délices!
Vive Jésus lorsque à mon aise
Il me permet que je la baise!”
[“Praise to Jesus, praise His power,
Praise His sweet allurements!
Praise to Jesus, when His goodness
Reduces me to nakedness;
Praise to Jesus when He says to me:
‘My sister, My dove, My beautiful one!’
“Praise to Jesus in all my steps,
Praise to His amorous charms!
Praise to Jesus, when His mouth
Touches mine in a loving kiss!
“Praise to Jesus when His gentle caresses
Overwhelm me with chaste joys!
Praise to Jesus when at my leisure
He allows me to kiss Him!”]
In addition to religious prostitution and to sexual mysticism, two other religious manifestations show an intimate relationship with the sexual life, are, indeed, in part of sexual origin—namely, asceticism and the belief in witchcraft.
Neither of these is, as has often been maintained by superficial writers, peculiar to the Christian faith. As Nietzsche says, Eros did not poison Christianity alone; asceticism and the belief in witchcraft are common anthropological conceptions, met with throughout the history of civilization, and arising from the primitive ardour of religious perceptions.
To what degree is the high estimation of asceticism—that is, the view that earthly and eternal salvation are to be found in complete sexual abstinence—associated with the religious sentiment? Religion is the yearning after an ideal, a belief in a process of perfectibility. To such a belief the sexual impulse and everything connected with it must appear as the greatest possible hindrance to the realization of the ideal, because nowhere else is the disharmony of existence so plainly manifest as in the sexual life.
In the fifth chapter of his work on “The Nature of Man,” Metchnikoff has collected all the numerous disharmonies of the reproductive organs and the reproductive functions, in consequence of which the modern man, become self-conscious, suffers so severely. Among these disharmonious phenomena in social life, Metchnikoff enumerates, inter alia, the troublesome, painful, and unæsthetic menstrual hæmorrhage in women, which all primitive peoples regarded as something unclean and evil; the pains of childbirth; the asynchronism between puberty and the general maturity of the organism, the latter occurring much later than the former, and thus giving rise to temporal inequalities of development in different parts of the sexual functions, causing, for example, masturbation actually before the development of spermatozoa; the long interval that commonly elapses between the onset of sexual maturity and the conclusion of marriage; the numerous disharmonious phenomena occurring in connexion with the decline of reproductive activity at a later stage of life, when marked specific excitability and sexual sensibility often persist after the capacity for sexual intercourse has been lost; and finally the disharmonies in sexual intercourse between man and woman.
According to Metchnikoff, this disharmony of the sexual life, from the earliest to the most advanced age, is the source of so many evils, that almost all religions have harshly judged and severely condemned the sexual functions, and have recommended abstinence from coitus as the best means for the harmonious and ideal regulation of life.