Let that be as it will, thus
much is certain, that however spiritual intrigues begin, they generally
conclude like all others; they may branch upwards toward heaven, but the
root is in the earth. Too intense a contemplation is not the business of
flesh and blood; it must, by the necessary course of things, in a little
time let go its hold, and fall into _matter_. Lovers for the sake of
celestial converse, are but another sort of Platonics, who pretend to see
stars and heaven in ladies' eyes, and to look or think no lower; but the
same _pit_ is provided for both."
To come down to recent times, in the last century the head-master of
Clifton College, when discussing the sexual vices of boyhood, remarked
that the boys whose temperament exposes them to these faults are usually
far from destitute of religious feelings; that there is, and always has
been, an undoubted co-existence of religion and animalism; that emotional
appeals and revivals are far from rooting out carnal sin; and that in some
places, as is well known, they seem actually to stimulate, even at the
present day, to increased licentiousness.[389]
It is not difficult to see how, even in technique, the method of the
revivalist is a quasi-sexual method, and resembles the attempt of the male
to overcome the sexual shyness of the female. "In each case," as W. Thomas
remarks, "the will has to be set aside, and strong suggestive means are
used; and in both cases the appeal is not of the conflict type, but of an
intimate, sympathetic and pleading kind.
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