s, and his face, every bit of
his body. We always want to have all, or part, of him as part of
ourselves. Hence the expression: I could _devour_ you, I love you
so. In some such warm, devouring way Jesus Christ, I have always
felt, loved each and every human creature. So it was that he took
this mystery of food, which by eating became part of ourselves,
as the symbol of the most intense human love, the most intense
Divine love. Some day, perhaps, love will be so understood by all
that this sacrament will cease to be a superstition, a bone of
contention, an 'article' of the church, and become, in all
simplicity, a symbol of pure love."

While in men it is possible to trace a tendency to inflict pain, or the
simulacrum of pain, on the women they love, it is still easier to trace in
women a delight in experiencing physical pain when inflicted by a lover,
and an eagerness to accept subjection to his will. Such a tendency is
certainly normal. To abandon herself to her lover, to be able to rely on
his physical strength and mental resourcefulness, to be swept out of
herself and beyond the control of her own will, to drift idly in delicious
submission to another and stronger will--this is one of the commonest
aspirations in a young woman's intimate love-dreams. In our own age these
aspirations most often only find their expression in such dreams. In ages
when life was more nakedly lived, and emotion more openly expressed, it
was easier to trace this impulse. In the thirteenth century we have found
Marie de France--a French poetess living in England who has been credited
with "an exquisite sense of the generosities and delicacy of the heart,"
and whose work was certainly highly appreciated in the best circles and
among the most cultivated class of her day--describing as a perfect, wise,
and courteous knight a man who practically commits a rape on a woman who
has refused to have anything to do with him, and, in so acting, he wins
her entire love. The savage beauty of New Caledonia furnishes no better
illustration of the fascination of force, for she, at all events, has done
her best to court the violence she undergoes. In Middleton's _Spanish
Gypsy_ we find exactly the same episode, and the unhappy Portuguese nun
wrote: "Love me for ever and make me suffer still more." To find in
literature more attenuated examples of the same tendency is easy.
Shakespeare, whose observation so little escape