leep with his nuns, notwithstanding the
remonstrances of pious friends who thought he was displaying too heroic a
manifestation of continence, failing to understand that he was effecting a
sweet compromise with continence. If, moreover, we consider the rarest and
finest of the saints we usually find that in their early lives there was a
period of full expansion of the organic activities in which all the
natural impulses had full play. This was the case with the two greatest
and most influential saints of the Christian Church, St. Augustine and St.
Francis of Assisi, absolutely unlike as they were in most other respects.
Sublimation, we see again and again, is limited, and the best developments
of the spiritual life are not likely to come about by the rigid attempt to
obtain a complete transmutation of sexual energy.

The old notion that any strict attempt to adhere to sexual abstinence is
beset by terrible risks, insanity and so forth, has no foundation, at all
events where we are concerned with reasonably sound and healthy people.
But it is a very serious error to suppose that the effort to achieve
complete and prolonged sexual abstinence is without any bad results at
all, physical or psychic, either in men or women who are normal and
healthy. This is now generally recognised everywhere, except in the
English-speaking countries, where the supposed interests of a prudish
morality often lead to a refusal to look facts in the face. As Professor
Naecke, a careful and cautious physician, stated shortly before his death,
a few years ago, the opinion that sexual abstinence has no bad effects is
not to-day held by a single authority on questions of sex; the fight is
only concerned with the nature and degree of the bad effects which, in
Naecke's belief--and he was doubtless right--are never of a gravely serious
character.

Yet we have also to remember that not only, as we have seen, is the effort
to achieve complete abstinence--which we ignorantly term "purity"--futile,
since we are concerned with a force which is being constantly generated
within the organism, but in the effort to achieve it we are abusing a
great source of beneficent energy. We lose more than half of what we might
gain when we cover it up, and try to push it back, to produce, it may be,
not harmonious activity in the world, but merely internal confusion and
distortion, and perhaps the paralysis of half the soul's energy. The
sexual activities of the organism,