ul. His depressed tone of
mind passes over into religious melancholy; 'he is forsaken by God; he
is lost.' All his afflictions have a religious color." In a similar
strain, Feuchtersleben says: "In the female sex especially, the erotic
delusion, unknown to the patient herself, often assumes the color of the
religious."[73-1] "The unaccomplished sexual designs of nature,"
observes a later author speaking of the effects of the single life,
"lead to brooding over supposed miseries which suggest devotion and
religious exercise as the nepenthe to soothe the morbid longings."[73-2]

Stimulate the religious sentiment and you arouse the passion of love,
which will be directed as the temperament and individual culture prompt.
Develope very prominently any one form of love, and by a native affinity
it will seize upon and consecrate to its own use whatever religious
aspirations the individual has. This is the general law of their
relation.

All the lower forms of love point to one to which they are the gradual
ascent, both of the individual and on a grander scale of the race, to
wit, the love of God. This is the passion for the highest attainable
truth, a passion which, as duty, prompts to the strongest action and to
the utter sacrifice of all other longings. No speculative acquaintance
with propositions satisfies it, no egotistic construction of systems,
but the truth expressed in life, the truth as that which alone either
has or can give being and diuturnity, this is its food, for which it
thirsts with holy ardor. Here is the genuine esoteric gnosis, the sacred
secret, which the rude and selfish wishes of the savage, the sensual
rites of Babylon, "mother of harlots," and the sublimely unselfish
dreams of a "religion of humanity," have alike had in their hearts, but
had no capacity to interpret, no words to articulate.

Related to this emotional phase of the religious sentiment is the
theurgic power of certain natural objects over some persons. The
biblical scholar Kitto confesses that the moon exerted a strange
influence on his mind, stirring his devotional nature, and he owns that
it would not have been hard for him to join the worshippers of the
goddess of the night. Wilhelm von Humboldt in one of his odes refers to
similar feelings excited in him by the gloom and murmur of groves. The
sacred poets and the religious arts generally acknowledge this
_fascination_, as it has been called, which certain phenomena have for
religi