Nor is it surprising that
the two emotions should have a dynamic relation to each other, and that
the auto-erotic impulse, being the more primitive and fundamental of the
two impulses, should be able to pass its unexpended energy over to the
religious emotion, there to find the expansion hitherto denied it, the
love of the human becoming the love of the divine.
"I was not good enough for man,
And so am given to God."
Even when there is absolute physical suppression on the sexual side, it
seems probable that thereby a greater intensity of spiritual fervor is
caused. Many eminent thinkers seem to have been without sexual desire.
It is a noteworthy and significant fact that the age of love is also the
age of conversion. Starbuck, for instance, in his very elaborate study of
the psychology of conversion shows that the majority of conversions take
place during the period of adolescence; that is, from the age of puberty
to about 24 or 25.[385]
It would be easy to bring forward a long series of observations, from the
most various points of view, to show the wide recognition of this close
affinity between the sexual and the religious emotions. It is probable, as
Hahn points out, that the connection between sexual suppression and
religious rites, which we may trace at the very beginning of culture, was
due to an instinctive impulse to heighten rather than abolish the sexual
element.
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