"There is an enchanted middle ground between virtue and vice, where many a soul lives and feeds in secret, and takes its reward for the restraint and mortification of its outward life. 

Humanity has plenty of men and women who lead faultless outward lives, and have no intention to sin, yet who yield their judgment, if not their conscience, to the motives of restraint, but who, in secret, resort to the fields of temptation, and seek among its excitements for the flavor, at least, of the sins which they have discarded. 

In fact, I have sometimes thought there were men and women who were really more in love with temptation than with sin -- who, by genuine experience have learned that feasts of the imagination were sweeter than the feasts of sense. Whether this be the case or not, I have no doubt that the love of temptation, for the excitement which it brings, is very common, even with those whom we esteem as patterns of virtue."

Timothy Titcomb.