SEXUAL INTERCOURSE--ITS LAWS AND
CONDITIONS--ITS USE AND ABUSE.
There is an increasing and alarming prevalence of nervous ailments and
complicated disorders that could be traced to have their sole origin
from this source. Hypochondria, in its various phases, results from
the premature and unnatural waste of the seminal fluid. Then speedily
ensues a lack of natural heat, a deficiency of vital power, and
consequently indigestion, melancholy, languor, and dejection ensue;
the victim becomes enervated and spiritless, loses the very attributes
of man, and premature old age soon follows.
IT IS A PREVALENT ERROR
that it is necessary for the semen to be ejected at certain times from
the body; that its retention is incompatible with sound health and
vigor of body and mind. This is a very fallacious idea. The seminal
fluid is too precious--nature bestows too much care in its elaboration
for it to be wasted in this unproductive manner. It is intended, when
not used for the purpose of procreation, to be reabsorbed again into
the system, giving vigor of body, elasticity and strength to the mind,
making the individual strong, active, and self-reliant. When kept as
nature intended, it is a perpetual fountain of life and energy--a
vital force which acts in every direction, a motive power which
infuses manhood into every organ of the brain and every fiber of the
body.
THE LAW OF SEXUAL MORALITY
for childhood is one of utter negation of sex. Every child should be
kept pure and free from amative excitement and the least amative
indulgence, which is unnatural and doubly hurtful. No language is
strong enough to express the evils of amative excitement and unnatural
indulgence before the age of puberty; and the dangers are so great
that I see no way so safe as
THOROUGH INSTRUCTION
regarding them at the earliest age. A child may be taught, simply as a
matter of science, as one learns botany, all that is needful to know,
and such knowledge may protect it from the most terrible evils.
The law for childhood is perfect purity, which cannot be too carefully
guarded and protected by parents, teachers, and all caretakers. The
law for youth is perfect continence--a pure vestalate alike in both
sexes. No indulgence is required by one more than the other--for both
nature has made the same provision. The natures of both are alike, and
any--the least--exercise of the amative function is an injury to one
as to the other.
MEN EXPECT
that women shall come to them in marriage chaste and pure from the
least defilement. Women have a right to expect the same of their
husbands. Here the sexes are upon a perfect equality.
On this subject, Dr. Carpenter (physiological works) has written like
a man of true science, and, therefore, of true morality. He lays it
down as an axiom that _the development of the individual and the
reproduction of the species stand in an inverse ratio to each other_.
He says: "The augmented development of the generative organs at
puberty can only be rightly regarded as _preparatory_ to the exercise
of the organs. The development of the _individual_ must be completed
before the procreative power can properly be exercised for the
continuance of the race." And in the following extract from his
"Principles of Human Physiology," he confirms my statement respecting
the unscientific and libertine advice of too many physicians: "The
author would say to those of his younger readers who urge the wants of
nature as an excuse for the illicit gratification of the sexual
passions, 'try the effects of _close mental application_ to some of
those ennobling pursuits to which your profession introduces you, in
combination with _vigorous bodily exercise_, before you assert that
appetite is unrestrainable and act upon that assertion.' Nothing tends
so much to increase the desire as the continual direction of the mind
toward the objects of its gratification, whilst nothing so effectually
represses it as a determined exercise of the mental faculties upon
other objects and the expenditure of nervous energy in other channels.
Some works which have issued from the medical press contain much that
is calculated to excite, rather than to repress, the propensity; and
the advice sometimes given by practitioners to their patients is
immoral as well as unscientific."
EVERY MAN AND EVERY WOMAN,
living simply, purely, and temperately--respecting the laws of health
in regard to air, food, dress, exercise, and habits of life--not only
can live in the continence of a pure virgin life when single, and in
the chastity which should be observed by all married partners, but be
stronger, happier, and in every way better by so living.
Chastity is the conservation of life, and the consecration of its
forces to the highest use. Sensuality is the waste of life, and the
degradation of its forces to pleasure divorced from use. Chastity is
life; sensuality is death.
FROM THE AGE OF PUBERTY TO MARRIAGE
the law, is the same for both sexes--full employment of mind and body,
temperance, purity, and perfect chastity in thought, word, and deed.
The law is one of perfect equality. There is no license for the male
which is not equally the right of the female. There is no
physiological ground for any indulgence in one case more than in the
other. No man has any more right to require or expect purity in the
woman who is to be his wife than the woman has to require and expect
purity in her husband. It is a simple matter of justice and right. No
man can enter upon an amative relation with a woman, except in
marriage, without manifest injustice to his future wife, unless he
allow her the same liberty; and also without a great wrong to the
woman, and to her possible husband.
It is contended that the sins of men against chastity are more venial
than those of women, because of the liability of women to have
children. But men are also liable to be the fathers of children, who
are deeply wronged by the absence of paternal care. The child has its
rights, and every child has the right to be born in honest,
respectable wedlock, of parents able to give it a sound constitution
and the nurture and education it requires. The child who lacks these
conditions is grievously wronged by both father and mother.
THE LAW OF MARRIAGE
is, that a mature man and woman, with sound health, pure lives, and a
reasonable prospect of comfortably educating a family, when drawn to
each other by the attraction of mutual love, should chastely and
temperately unite for offspring. The sexual relation has this chief
and controlling purpose. The law of nature is intercourse for
reproduction. Under the Christian law, marriage is the symbol of the
union of Christ with the Church; husband and wife are one in the Lord;
they are to live in marriage chastity, not in lust and uncleanness;
and there cannot be a more hideous violation of Christian morals than
for a husband to vent his sensuality upon a feeble wife; against her
wishes and when she has no desire for offspring and no power to give
them the healthy constitutions and maternal care which is their right.
The law of Christian morality is very clear. It is the sexual union
first and chiefly for its principal object. It is for the husband to
refrain from it whenever it is not desired; whenever it would be
hurtful to either; whenever it would be a waste of life; whenever it
would injure mother or child, as during pregnancy and lactation.
A MAN WHO TRULY LOVES A WOMAN
must respect and reverence her, and cannot make her the victim of his
inordinate and unbridled, selfish and sensual nature. He will be ever,
from the first moment of joyful possession to the last of his life,
tender, delicate, considerate, deferent, yielding to her slightest
wishes in the domain of love, and never encroaching, never trespassing
upon, never victimizing the wife of his bosom and the mother of his
babes. We have romance before marriage, we want more chivalry in
marriage.
This is not the world's morality, yet it seems to one the world must
respect it. This, high and pure Christian morality is not always
enforced by Christian ministers, some of whom yield too much to human
sensuality and depravity, instead of maintaining the higher law of
Christian purity, which is but nature restored or freed from its
stains of sin. The world requires that unmarried women should be
chaste, while it gives almost unbridled license to men. A girl
detected in amours is disgraced and often made an outcast. In young
men such irregularities are freely tolerated. They are "a little
wild"; they "sow their wild oats"; but open profligacy, the seduction
of innocence, the ruin of poor girls, adultery, harlotry and its
diseases do not hinder men from marrying, nor from requiring that
those they marry should have spotless reputations. It is not for a
moment permitted that women in these matters should behave like men,
and a pure girl is given to the arms of a wasted debauchee, and her
babes are perhaps born dead, or suffer through life with syphilitic
diseases, while she endures a long martyrdom from disordered,
diseased, and unrestrained sensuality. For the unmarried, young men,
soldiers, sailors, and all who do not choose to bear the burdens of a
family, society has its armies of prostitutes--women like others, and
more than others, or in less reputable fashion, the victims of the
unbridled lust of men. They are everywhere tolerated as
"NECESSARY EVILS,"
and, in some places, protected or regulated; and, from economical or
philanthropic considerations, or both, combined efforts are made to
free them from the contagious diseases which for some centuries have
been a curse attending this form of the violation of the laws of
nature--one of the consequences of lust which is the divorce of the
sexual instinct from its natural use and purpose.
The Christian
LAW OF MARRIAGE,
as set down in the Holy Scriptures, and defined by the best writers on
moral theology, is in harmony with nature, in consonance with the
higher nature of man. "God hath set the earth in families." Adultery
is a sin, because it disorders that divine arrangement. Fornication is
a sin, because it prevents pure marriages. Prostitution is a sin,
because it is a sacrifice of women, who might be wives and mothers, to
the selfish lusts of men. All useless indulgence is a waste of life,
and a kind of suicide. In a pure marriage union, men and women unite
themselves with God in acts of creative power. The progress of
humanity depends upon individual development and the conditions at
generation and gestation. With culture and a harmonized development,
we acquire a higher and more integral life. When two parents are in
their highest condition and in
A TRUE UNION
with each other, the child combines the best qualities of both
parents. When parents are not in the unity of a mutual love, the child
may be inferior to either parent. The intensity of mutual love tends
to the reproduction of the best faculties of both parents in the
child. When men or women are exhausted or diseased the race
deteriorates. Health is therefore one of the conditions of progress.
"It is all very fine," I shall be told, "to talk of purity and
chastity; but we must take men as they are. How are you going to make
men pure and chaste, and respectful of the purity of women? How can
you get men with strong amative propensities to live like anchorites?"
How can you get men to do anything right, or refrain from any wrong
thing? There are three motives--fear of punishment, hope of reward,
and sense of right or the principle of duty. The first of these is the
lowest, but often the most effectual; the second is higher, and
appeals to hope and the love of happiness; the third, the highest of
all motives, pure and unselfish as the love of truth, as in
mathematics, acts on noble minds with great power. Men of real
conscientiousness love the right for its own sake. They are just from
love of justice; pure from a sense and love of purity. They love good,
and God as the source of all good; and do right, not from fear or
hope, but from pure love.
We must appeal to all motives. Men refrain from theft and other
dishonest conduct from the dread of disgrace and punishment, because
they see that "honesty is the best policy," and from a sense of
justice and regard to the rights of property, or a sense of honor
which makes a mean action impossible. By similar motives great numbers
are restrained from drunkenness and other vices. Children are to be
restrained from impurity by the fear of the terrible consequences of
unnatural indulgence in causing disease and pain, by the hope of a
pure, healthy and happy life of love in manhood and womanhood, and by
a sense of the beauty and holiness of chastity and the sacredness of
the functions by which the race is recreated and preserved. The
religious feelings that our bodies are to be kept pure, healthy, and
holy in every way as the temples of the Holy Ghost cannot be too early
instilled into the infant mind, which is open to the highest
sentiments of veneration, devotion, and heroic religion. In youth
there are the same motives. Indulgence in solitary vice is
self-destructive of all that youth most values--a profanation of his
own body.
SEDUCTION
is a desecration of what he should hold in the most tender reverence.
To the young man, womanhood should be sacred, and every woman, mother,
sister, beloved of the present or the future, should never be wronged
by one thought of impurity. In this matter instinct goes with right.
The inward voice supports the outer law of morality. Before men can
become bad, their instinctive modesty must be broken down. Unless very
badly born, with disordered amativeness, hereditary from a diseased
and lustful parentage, they must be perverted and corrupted before
they can act immodestly and impurely.
WOMEN ARE PROTECTED
by a strong public sentiment around them. They have the dread of
disgrace. For them to yield to their own affectionate desires, or the
solicitations of a lover, is a fall, is ruin. They have the hope of a
loving husband, a happy home, and the respect of society. And in woman
passion has commonly less force, and the sentiment of modesty and
purity more power. Women are weak in yielding to solicitation, giving
EVERYTHING FOR LOVE;
but we see how protective of female virtue are these motives to vast
numbers.
Men can perfectly restrain the sensual part of their natures whenever
they have a strong motive to do so. A child would be simply mad who
was not controlled by the presence of father, mother, and persons he
respected or feared. Young men have no difficulty when they are in the
company of pure women. They are in no trouble when their lives are
full of mental and muscular activity, and particularly if their habits
of eating simply and temperately, of refraining from heating and
exciting stimulants, and sleeping in cold beds and fresh air, are such
as health requires. There needs but the strong will to live purely in
any one, and at any age, the will that comes from the high motives of
conscience and religion, or all motives combined. A strong sense of
what is just and right controls even the motions of our bodies and
actions which seem to be involuntary. A man who has a vivid sense of
the right and duty of refraining from sensuality, and preserving his
own purity of mind and body and the chastity of all women, will do so
even in his dreams. When the will is right, all things are soon
brought into its subjection. The mind controls the organization, and
the life forces are directed into other channels. A strong man, full
of
LIFE AND LOVE,
can safely hold a virgin in his arms, and respect her virginity, if he
have but the motives and the will to do so. If he be pure in his
will, how can he commit impurity? If a woman be sacred in his eyes,
how can he profane her? It is not that men have not the power of
restraint, the power to do right; it is that they lack the motive.
They have lost the sense of right; they are even impelled to do wrong
by the pressure of opinion around them. Boys and young men are driven
into libertinage by the ridicule of their companions. Vice is
considered manly. They seek sensuality in an evil emulation, as they
learn to smoke, or gamble, or drink; and, later on, vanity has often
more to do with excess than the force of lust. Young men seduce girls
that they may boast of it. They keep mistresses because it is the
fashion. They exhaust themselves because they wish to give a high idea
of their manly powers. Even in marriage, women are injured and have
their health destroyed by yielding weakly, or from
A FALSE SENSE OF DUTY,
to a husband whose own motive is the desire to acquit himself manfully
in what he considers his marital duties. Men and women are, in
thousands of cases, wretched victims to what they imagine to be the
wants or expectations of each other. A man, ignorant of the nature of
women and the laws of the generative function, goes on in a process of
miserable exhaustion, to please his wife. She submits, sometimes in
pain, often in disgust, weariness, and weakness, to what she dare not,
from
LOVE OR FEAR,
refuse. Men have to know what is right and to will to be right. This
will is omnipotent. God helps those who have the will, who have even
the desire, to do right.
If the presence of those we fear or reverence, respect or love,
restrain us from sin and stimulate us to right action, faith in the
existence and presence of God and angels, and the spirits of the
departed, must have a more powerful and pervading influence. No one
who really believes in the existence of a Supreme Being, no one who is
strongly impressed with the reality of a spiritual life, can go on
doing what he knows to be wrong. A religious faith is therefore the
most powerful of all restraints from evil and incitement to good.