For such as are appealed to by any consideration of religion, it is well to reflect that everything in Holy Writ directly teaches that the unreformed profligate, the fornicator and adulterer, has no place or part in the Holy City; that his name is blotted out from the "Book of Life," and that he must remain "without," where are "dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolators, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie." The assurance is here emphatically given that the laws of religion, of the true moralist, and of the physician and hygienist are all in complete harmony, and the chaos of confusion only exists in the disordered minds of those who seek for excuses which would shame the inferior animals.
As Maudsley says, " The foolishest opinion has commonly some partial facet of sense"; and men are abroad, filled with sophistry, who make all kinds of pretexts to justify themselves and others; who call that which is bitter, sweet; that which is unhealthy, physiological; that which is evil, good; and that which is a grave social harm, expedient. Fortunately, the most worthless and shameless members of the community are somewhat prevented from propagating their kind by barrenness and sterility, and, as the result of disease, their vitiated progeny are apt to be eliminated in time.
To the vigorous, and the active and the sound, whose generative functions remain unimpaired, with a pure and normal glow of healthy activity, comes the satisfaction of
knowing that their descendants will be the fittest and the most likely to survive in the struggle for existence; and this is no mean comfort to those who have the normal philoprogenitive ambitions. Tennyson's hero, the spotless, virgin and blameless knight Sir Galahad, who went in quest of the Holy Grail, made this boast:
" My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure."
" What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted!"
SHAKESPEARES, Z Eenry VI., iii., 2.
Purity is, in fact, the crown of all real manliness; and the vigorous and the robust, who by repression of evil have preserved their sexual potency, make the best husbands and fathers, and they are the direct benefactors of the race by begetting progeny who are not predisposed to sexual vitiation and bodily and mental degeneracy. These are laws which are universally recognized bv all breeders of stock and by those who have made a study of the races of mankind.
From a purely selfish standpoint a man must give heed to an even stronger impulse than the sexual appetite namely, to the law of self-preservation. He must consider 1. The peril to his body; 2. The peril to his character or moral constitution.
The reader is here cautioned not to rely too much on his own slender experience, but to seek after the unalterable truth; for his personal observations have probably not led him to see either the death of the body or the damnation of the psychical characteristics, and he is not at once struck by these perils. We must reflect that Nature is leisurely; and when we have added a considerable number of years to our experience we can see that her laws pursue their course unerringly, and that no pardon is granted for sins committed against the body, whether knowingly or not.
The statement is almost without exception that every one who pursues unlawful sexual indulgence to any considerable extent gets inoculated with disease sooner or later, and only very rarely is it otherwise. It is the part of a foolish man to say, " I'll take my chances," for he not only imperils his whole future life, and that of his wife to be and offspring, but also practically elects to acquire disease. We physicians see these men who have " taken their chances" ; we see sterility acquired by them and imparted to their wives; we see innocent wives and children suffer from unmerited venereal diseases, the nature of which obviously cannot be revealed; we see the severest operations, where women's abdomens are cut open by the surgeon's knife for the removal of the dineased reproductive organs; we frequently see young wives rendered chronic invalids from the time of their marriage, and sometimes we see them die; we see premature deaths of foetuses from disease, and children with distorted anatomy and vulnerable tissues; we see blind asylums and insane asylums recruited as the aftermath of men's "chances."