With somewhat more
psychological insight, the wise old Knight of the Tower, Landry, in the
fourteenth century, tells his daughters that "no young woman, in love,
can ever serve her God with that unfeignedness which she did aforetime.
For I have heard it argued by many who, in their young days, had been in
love that, when they were in the church, the condition and the pleasing
melancholy in which they found themselves would infallibly set them
brooding over all their tender love-sick longings and all their amorous
passages, when they should have been attending to the service which was
going on at the time. And such is the property of this mystery of love
that it is ever at the moment when the priest is holding our Saviour upon
the altar that the most enticing emotions come." After narrating the
history of two queens beyond the seas who indulged in amours even on Holy
Thursday and Good Friday, at midnight in their oratories, when the lights
were put out, he concludes: "Every woman in love is more liable to fall in
church or at her devotion than at any other time."
The connection between religious emotion and sexual emotion was very
clearly set forth by Swift about the end of the seventeenth century, in a
passage which it may be worth while to quote from his "Discourse
Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit." After mentioning that
he was informed by a very eminent physician that when the Quakers first
appeared he was seldom without female Quaker patients affected with
nymphomania, Swift continues: "Persons of a visionary devotion, either men
or women, are, in their complexion, of all others the most amorous.
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