radicate the sexual
instinct and in so doing has antagonized an instinct that is as
fundamental as that of self-preservation. All it has accomplished is a
distortion. The church, by claiming that it alone was privileged to
regulate sexual desires, has done one of two things to each of its
adherents. It has either made him a hypocrite or driven him insane. Much
of the insanity in this country could be overcome were religion and sex
permanently divorced; and an immediate amount of inestimable good could
be accomplished when one considers that fifteen per cent of all mental
disease is caused by syphilis.

Physical disease having been considered as a malicious trick of Satan,
it was but natural that the disease of the mind was also attributed to
satanic intervention. The conception that insanity was a brain disease,
and that gentleness and kindness were necessary for its treatment, was
throttled by Christian theology for fifteen centuries. Instead the
ecclesiastic burdened humanity with a belief that madness was largely
possession by the Devil. Hundreds of thousands of men and women were
inflicted with tortures both physical and mental. It was not until 1792
that the great French physician Penel, and William Tuke in England,
placed the treatment of mental disease on a rational and scientific
basis. And this, in spite of such ecclesiastical attacks as were seen in
the _Edinburgh Review_ of that period. These two men, Penel and Tuke,
were the first acknowledged victors in a struggle of science for
humanity which lasted nearly two thousand years.

The clergy resisted Jenner when he introduced vaccination, and yet the
application of this measure of defense against disease has probably
saved more lives than the total of all the lives lost in all wars. The
clergy maintained that "Smallpox is a visitation from God, and
originates in man, but Cowpox is produced by presumptious, impious men.
The former, heaven ordained, the latter is perhaps a daring and profane
violation of our holy order."

In the seventeenth century, the Jesuit missionaries in South America
learned from the natives the value of the so-called Peruvian Bark in the
treatment of ague. In 1638, quinine, derived from this bark, was
introduced into Europe as a cure for malaria. It was stigmatized as "an
invention of the Devil." The ecclesiastical opposition to this drug was
so strong that it was not introduced into England until 1653.

The medieval Christians saw in