Probably there is no people in the world among whom this belief has not had at some one time or another a very great influence.

At a later time, in the early civilizations, this idea would seem to have obtained much larger sway, and to have affected national life more and more extensively.

In the age of the great religions the idea reaches its acme, an acme often represented by extravagances of the most painful kind and sacrifices which strike modern imagination as ferocious and terrible.

In Europe asceticism reached its great extremes as you know during the Middle Ages, and especially took the direction of antagonism to the natural sex-relation.

Looking back to-day to the centuries in which celibacy was considered the most moral condition, and marriage was counted as little better than weakness, when Europe was covered with thousands of monasteries, and when the best intellects of the age deemed it the highest duty to sacrifice everything pleasurable for the sake of an imaginary reward after death, we can not but recognize that we are contemplating a period of religious insanity.
Even in the architecture of the time, the architecture that Ruskin devoted his splendid talent to praise, there is a grim and terrible something that suggests madness.