The indifference and lack of opprobrium with which both Greeks and Romans, as well as some of the earlier nations, treated this form of autogenous vice, prove, very clearly, that refinement of intellect is one thing and refinement of morals quite another; that however high a nation may rise in the scale of intellectual and Bocial culture, there can be neither solidity nor decorum in any society not founded on ethical principles, the purest present exponent of which is, undoubtedly, the Christian religion.

If the genius of primitive Christianity strongly proscribed all sexual relationships not conforming to certain specified laws, and conditions, and if the bann of the Church failed to fall equally heavily upon the secret sins which, as I have intimated, lay at the weakest line of human defence, it was not the fault of the Church, per se, so much as that, in damming back the turbulent waters of sexual passion, it failed at the outset to adequately appreciate the essential and inherent viciousness of what it had to contend with—human nature. Hence it was quite natural that, as in the case of the Father Mathew temperance crusade in Ireland, when intoxication by ether took the place of intoxication by alcohol; and as in the same movement in America, the drug habit grew in exact proportion to the diminution of the drink habit, there should result that increase of homosexual and auto-erotic vice among religious devotees, which, however, rapidly began to disappear m soon as Christian ideals became better established and mora intelligently apprehended.

Lío Quarrel With The Church

In order that I may not be accused of being a "priest devourer, or of making assertions, touching their impure practices, which cannot be substantiated, {for I have too sincere a regard for the Church, and too firm a faith in her ultimate mission, as well as divine ordination, to be lightly led into making such), I may quote from Migne's "Essay on Pollution,"1 that under certain circumstances the Catholic theologians have permitted a married woman to masturbate. Gury, the deeply learned Jesuit theologian, declares explicitly that the wife commits no sin "quae se ipsam tactibus excitat ad seminationem statim post copulam in qua vir solus seminavit;"1 but it must, however, in common justice to the Church, be explained that this modified permission to the wife to masturbate, rests on the then prevalent false idea of fecundation, even among physicians. This taught that "seminal ejaculation" by the woman was quite as necessary as by the man, to ensure impregnation; and if the former failed in this, during coitus, as the Catholic Church had, and has, always discountenanced sexual intercourse without fecundation, it was plainly the woman's duty to complete the act by artificial means.

According to the same writer,9 the belief that the emission of vaginal mucus, under the influence of sexual excitement in women, corresponds to spermatic emission in the male, has led to the practice of masturbation on hygienic grounds. Gamier, indeed, mentions* that Mesue", in the eighteenth century, invented a special pessary to take the place of the penis, and, as he states, "effect the due expulsion of the feminine sperm." This, of course, after coitus.