But with the growth and dissemination of Christianity, strange as it may seem, came an insidious, but not tiie less real, tendency to sexual perversion. While among the Greeks and early Romans, as well as the Babylonians and Ninevites, very shocking obscenities were indulged in, notably during the festivals in honor of Bacchus and Priapus, in which, we are told, naked girls danced in half drunken frenzy in the Dionysian and Floral processions, around an immense artificial penis, carried on the end of a pole, departures from the natural method of sexual gratification were extremely rare.

1 "Woman, thou shouldst go forever jn sorrow and rags, thy eyes filled with tears! Thou hast brought man to the ground."—Tertullian.

"Woman is a door for the devil, a way to evil, the sting of the scorpion."—St. Hieronyraus,

"It were well," remarked Jason to Medea, "that the female race should not exist. Then there would not have Iwen any evil among men." (Eurip., "Medea," 574.)

Milton voices the same sentiment {Par. Lost, x, 800), and Moncure D. Conway, M.A., emphasizes it ("Demonology," n, 412, et sec.) by hia legend of Noah's wife having smuggled the devil into the ark, in addition to Eve's original sin. Guy Pattn also, notwithstanding that ho was a polite Frenchman, has his ungallant fling at woman in Uie following words: "Ce serpent, dans la Gen&se, etoit quelque Jeune Dameret qui donna la verole a Eve, et voile le peche original de nos Moines."

Lechery was the rule, lasciviousness a fine art, and intercourse between the sexes as open and common as, nay far commoner than, between brutes in a free state of nature; but it was only when Christianity began to place its restrictions upon sexual indulgence, solemnizing and making sacred the institution of marriage, that the unnatural secret vices of later times began to flourish, and self abuse and homosexuality—offering the readiest outlet to sexual passion—took the place, largely, of the legitimate congress. Thus, it was only when philosophy had refined the intellectual life of Greece, that Diogenes the Cynic, whom Zella calls the most typical figure of ancient Greece, as Plutarch tells us, was praised by Chrysippus for publicly masturbating in the market place.