The
expression in Murillo's 'Immaculate Conception' may be interpreted by
the highest voluptuous exaltation of love as well as by holy
transfiguration. The 'saints' of Correggio regard the Virgin with an
amorous ardour which may be celestial, but appears in reality extremely
terrestrial and human."[96]

Another German authority remarks:--

"I venture to express my conviction that we should rarely err if, in a
case of religious melancholy, we assumed the sexual apparatus to be
implicated."[97]

Dr. Bevan Lewis points out how frequently religious exaltation occurs
with women at puberty, and religious melancholia at the period of sexual
decline. And Dr. Charles Mercier puts the interchangeability of sexual
and religious feelings in the following passage:--

"Religious observances provide an alternative, into which the amatory
instinct can be easily and naturally diverted. The emotions and
instinctive desires, which finds expression in courtship, is a vast body
of vague feeling, which is at first undirected.... It is a voluminous
state of exaltation that demands enthusiastic action. This is the state
antecedent to falling in love, and if an object presents himself or
herself, the torrent of emotion is directed into amatory passion. But if
no object appears, or if the selected object is denied, then religious
observances yield a very passable substitute for the expression of the
emotion. Religious observances provide the sensuous atmosphere, the call
for self-renunciation, the means of expressing powerful and voluminous
feeling, that the potential or disappointed lover needs. The madrigal is
transformed into the hymn; the adornment of the person that should have
gone to allure the beloved now takes the shape of ecclesiastical
vestments; the reverence that should have been paid to the loved one is
transformed to a higher object; the enthusiasm that would have expanded
in courtship is expressed in worship; the gifts that would have been
made, the services that would have been rendered to the loved one, are
transferred to the Church."[98]

Dr. Krafft-Ebing, after dwelling upon the substantial identity of sexual
love and religious emotion, summarises his conclusions by saying:--

"Religious and sexual hyperaesthesia at the acme of development show the
same volume of intensity and the same quality of excitement, and may,
therefore, under given circumstances interchange. Both will in certain
pathologic states degenerate int