Volume 6 — CHAPTER VI. (continued 2)
Reading edition
[104]
Corre (Les Criminels, p. 351) mentions that of thirteen priests convicted of crime, six were guilty of sexual attempts on children, and of eighty-three convicted lay teachers, forty-eight had committed similar offenses. This was at a time when lay teachers were in practice almost compelled to live a celibate life; altered conditions have greatly diminished this class of offense among them. Without going so far as crime, many moral and religious men, clergymen and others, who have led severely abstinent lives in youth, sometimes experience in middle age or later the eruption of almost uncontrollable sexual impulses, normal or abnormal. In women such manifestations are apt to take the form of obsessional thoughts of sexual character, as e.g., the case (Comptes-Rendus Congrès International de Médecine, Moscow, 1897, vol. iv, p. 27) of a chaste woman who was compelled to think about and look at the sexual organs of men.
[105]
J. A. Godfrey, The Science of Sex, p. 138.
[106]
See, e.g., Havelock Ellis, "St. Francis and Others," Affirmations.