r to his vanity or his lust under a religious guise; on
the other hand, there is an exaggerated self-feeling, often rooted in
the sexual passion, which is unwittingly fostered under the cloak of
religious emotion, and which is apt to conduct to madness or to sin. In
such cases the holy kiss owes its warmth to the sexual impulse, which
inspires it, consciously or unconsciously, and the mystical religious
union of the sexes is fitted to issue in a less spiritual union."[111]

Many manuals of devotion will be found to furnish the same kind of
evidence as biographical narratives concerning the intimate relations
that exists between sexuality and religious feeling. What has just been
said may be repeated here, namely, that if the religious associations
were dispelled, there would be no mistaking the nature of feelings that
originated much of this class of writing, or the feelings to which they
appeal. The serious fact is that the appeal is there whether we
recognise it or not, and it is a question worthy of serious
consideration whether the unwary imagination of the young may be not as
surely debauched by certain books of devotion as by a frankly erotic
production. It is not without reason that d'Israeli the elder, in an
essay omitted from all editions of his book after the first, remarked
that "poets are amorous, lovers are poetical, but saints are both."[112]
Take, for example, the following from a collection of old English
homilies, dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries:--

"Jesus, my holy love, my sure sweetness! Jesus, my heart, my joy, my
soul-heal! Jesus, sweet Jesus, my darling, my life, my light, my balm,
my honey-drop!... Kindle me with the blaze of Thy enlightening love. Let
me be Thy leman, and teach me to love Thee.... Oh, that I might behold
how Thou stretchedst Thyself for me on the cross. Oh, that I might cast
myself between those same arms, so very wide outspread.... Oh, that I
were in Thy arms, in Thy arms so stretchedst and outspread on the
cross."

Or this, from the same collection:--

"Sweet Jesus, my love, my darling, my Lord, my Saviour, my balm, sweeter
is the remembrance of Thee than honey in the mouth. Who is there that
may not love Thy lovely face? Whose heart is so hard that may not melt
at the remembrance of Thee? Oh! who may not love Thee, lovely Jesus?
Jesus, my precious darling, my love, my life, my beloved, my most worthy
of love, my heart's balm, Thou art lovesome in counten