Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/98

68 for an owl which they had heard hooting. It was probably only my peculiar insane, half-suppressed shrieks they had heard.

At this time I entered the following in my diary: "I am experiencing the enslaving power of sin. I now know how to sympathize with poor sinners, drunkards and harlots. . . . Do such perverse passions spring from idolatry and forgetting God, as St. Paul says? But for several years I have lived in communion with God. Several different times in my life I have passed a month without conscious sin. How can this accord with the fact that I have repeatedly in childhood and several times in youth committed the act [fellatio] recognized by men as the most heinous of crimes? "

I soon went to my village home for the summer, where I found the struggle against sensuality much less severe. For the first month there I lived without conscious sin. Through occupying my mind diligently with the high ethical ideals presented in the New Testament, and living continually in the spirit of prayer, I was able to bar completely from my life all the movings of the sensual nature, and all regard for self. Indeed I lived in this state of "entire sanctification" almost throughout the summer vacation, spending several hours a day in religious exercises. I came into intimate relations with a Christian faith-curist, and felt it to be my religious duty to be anointed by him for the removal of my perverted nature and for the reception of the normal instincts of a man. For over a month after the anointing, I persisted in the confident belief that God had miraculously brought about