seduction had been accomplished by deceit.  But they largely tended in practice to subordinate all questions of sexual morality to a money question.  The reparation to the woman, also, largely became necessary because the ecclesiastical conception of lust caused her value to be depreciated by contact with lust, and the reparation might be said to constitute a part of penance.  Aquinas held that lust, in however slight a degree, is a mortal sin, and most of the more influential theologians took a view nearly or quite as rigid.  Some, however, held that a certain degree of delectation is possible in these matters without mortal sin, or asserted, for instance, that to feel the touch of a soft and warm hand is not mortal sin so long as no sexual feeling is thereby aroused.  Others, however, held that such distinctions are impossible, and that all pleasures of this kind are sinful.  Tomas Sanchez endeavored at much length to establish rules for the complicated problems of delectation that thus arose, but he was constrained to admit that no rules are really possible, and that such matters must be left to the judgment of a prudent man.  At that point casuistry dissolves and the modern point of view emerges (see, e.g., Lea, History of Auricular Confession, vol. ii, pp. 57, 115, 246, etc.).

Even to-day the influence of the old traditions of the Church still unconsciously survives among us.  That is inevitable as regards religious teachers, but it is found also in men of science, even in Protestant countries.  The result is that quite contradictory dogmas are found side by side, even in the same writer.  On the one hand, the manifestations of the sexual impulse are emphatically condemned as both unnecessary and evil; on the other hand, marriage, which is fundamentally (whatever else it may also be) a manifestation of the sexual impulse, receives equally emphatic approval as the only proper and moral form of living.[93] There can be no reasonable doubt whatever that it is to the surviving and pervading influence of the ancient traditional theological conception of libido that we must largely attribute the sharp difference of opinions among physicians on the question of sexual abstinence and the otherwise unnecessary acrimony with which these opinions have sometimes been stated.

On the one side, we find the emphatic statement that sexual intercourse is necessary and that health cannot be maintained unless the sexual activities are regularly exercised.

“All parts of the body which are developed for a definite use are kept in health, and in the enjoyment of fair growth and of long youth, by the fulfilment of that use, and by their appropriate exercise in the employment to which they are accustomed.”  In that statement, which occurs in the great Hippocratic treatise “On the Joints,” we have the classic expression of the doctrine which in ever varying forms has been taught by all those who have protested against