A young man nowadays is expected to know a good deal about sexual matters, and men laugh at those who are entirely ignorant and uninformed. Earely is it possible to find one who has no ideas at all in this direction; nor is such innocence commendable.
As a rule, unfortunately, young men attain their knowledge by participation in evil ways and from evil conversation, and therefore their conclusions must necessarily be erroneous. Complete ignorance is impossible.
Men will have either true or false notions: if false, they will be led into great and irreparable harm; if true, they will recoil in horror at the awful consequences of impurity to themselves, to womankind, and to posterity. One who does not folly understand these questions is like a ship which puts to sea with a skipper in charge who does not properly understand navigation.
In the voyage of life, from the port of clearance to the final haven, it is impossible forever to hug the shore; and he is a poor mariner indeed who is fit only for fair-weather sailing. Men are so constituted, in contradistinction to women, that it is hardly possible for them, if they are sound and strong, to grow up to mature age immaculate, and without the fault of a sensual thought, word, or deed; and there can be no gainsaying this.
But as true men we hope to have power to resist temptation-that the swords which we would wrongfully wield may be as lead, and that whatever knowledge we have may be turned to the benefit and advantage of our brothers. If any one has fallen into the mire, let us "condemn the fault, and not the actor of it," and let us help him out, if we can, by showing him why he should cultivate his faculty of self-restraint and become a self-governed being.
Sidney Smith says: "Very few young men have the power of negation in any great degree at first. Every young man must be exposed to temptation; he cannot learn the way of men without being witness to their vices. If you attempt to preserve him from danger by keeping him out of the way of it, you render him quite unfit for any style of life in which he may be placed. The great point is, not to turn him out too soon, and to give him a pilot."
It will not do to indulge in youthful excesses and dissipations, nor to sow "wild oats" of the kind which partake of the nature of sexual impurity, because this sexual instinct is so enormously the imperious and moving power in our whole lives that the early tampering with it may produce a lasting impression on the cerebral centres which may color and poison all future sexual acts even after marriage.
When the reaping of the harvest comes, there is likely to be, in addition to disease which has been acquired, a more or less unconquerable loathing for pure sexual relations with one's wife, if the individual ever marries, partly from fear of impotency in the pure relation with her, partly from weakened powers brought about by excesses of venery or masturbation, partly on account of the recollection of some former delectable lascivious situation with a loose woman which has become an imperative and dominant concept, and partly, perhaps, from an acquired preference for unnatural and perverted sexual acts.
It will not do to sow " wild oats" which leave an ineradicable stain on the mind, nor to implant them in such soil that they may spring up and produce a poisonous crop. Under no circumstances can any one at any time be recommended to trifle with affairs which belong to the sexual domain, for in sowing " wild oats" of a dirty kind a man simply inoculates vice into his posterity and throws an injection of ignoble blood into the course of descent which follows after him as an ancestor. Any kind of larks and escapades will do which are manly, and brave, and clean and honest. It is right that any man should "dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none."