Here the most inquisitive may safely learn in the school of Christ that which will prove for their present and everlasting good. The uneasy and dissatisfied will here find rest. With their thoughts and affections centered in Christ, they will obtain true wisdom, which will be worth more to them than the richest earthly treasures.
Many professed Christians do not labor perseveringly. They make too little effort, and are not ready and willing to deny self. The prayer of the living Christian will be “to be filled with the knowledge of His will, in all wisdom, and spiritual understanding, that they may walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God, strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and long-suffering, with joyfulness.” “In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”
Here is the true knowledge which should be desired, and possessed by every Christian. This knowledge will not lead to ungodliness. It will not break down the constitution, or bring a gloomy cloud over the mind; but will33impart substantial joys, and true happiness. This wisdom is divine, and flows ceaselessly from a pure fountain which gives peace, joy, and health.
Even many professed Christians seem to have no earnest desire for this heavenly knowledge, and remain in willing ignorance of this divine grace which it is their privilege to obtain. The only safety for the youth is to seek this precious wisdom which will assuredly destroy all desire for corrupt knowledge. And when they have acquired a relish for the pure, calm, satisfying joys of faith and holiness, every feeling of their being will rise in abhorrence to corrupting pleasures. All can choose life if they will. They can resist sin, take pleasure in the ways of righteousness and true holiness, and be rewarded with eternal life in God’s everlasting kingdom. If they choose to corrupt their ways before the Lord, defile their own bodies and commit self-murder, they can do so; but they should remember the judgment is to sit, and the books are to be opened, and they are to be judged out of those things which are written in the books, according to their works. What a fearful, spotted record will be opened before them, of their secret thoughts, and vile acts. Sentence is pronounced upon them, and they are shut out from the city of God, with the ungodly, and miserably perish with the wicked.
Now is the time of preparation. None need to expect that God will do the work of preparing and fitting them up, without their efforts. It is for them to work the works of34righteousness, and crowd all the right-doing they can into the little space of time allotted to them before probation closes, that they may have a clean record in Heaven.
FURTHER TESTIMONY.
We have thought proper to add to the foregoing the following Testimonies from men of high standing and authority in the medical world, corroborative of the views presented in the preceding pages. And in justice to the Writer of those pages, we would say that she had read nothing from the authors here quoted, and had read no other works on this subject, previous to putting into our hands what she has written. She is not, therefore, a copyist, although she has stated important truths to which men who are entitled to our highest confidence, have borne testimony.
TRUSTEES.
CHASTITY.
DEFINITION OF UNCHASTITY.
UNCHASTITY includes all the action, whether of body or mind, which is forbidden by the seventh commandment. And all that is therein forbidden, may be included under the two following heads:
Unchastity of the mind.
Unchastity of the conduct.
By unchastity of the mind, is meant the conception of unchastity in the mind, the cherishing of impure desire. All sin has its seat in the mind. The seventh commandment, like every other, extends to “thoughts and intents of the heart.” “This,” says Dwight, “is unanswerably evident from our Saviour’s comment on this precept (the seventh commandment), ‘Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery already with her in his heart.’” Matt. v, 28. And with this agrees another scripture, which says, “Out of the heart proceedeth—adulteries.”
By unchastity of the conduct, we are to understand the acting out of unchastity in any of its various ways of developing sinful thoughts, as,
1. By unchaste conversation, writing, looks, and gestures. “Speech is the mirror of the soul.” And hence it is that “by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” Matt. xii, 37. But significant looks, writing, gestures, &c., being but substitutes for words, and the tongue, are, like them, capable of being made the ministers of sin; hence, also, they must be subject to the same general law.
UNCHASTITY IN THE SIGHT OF GOD.
Unchastity, loathsome and abhorrent as it is in the sight of good men, is infinitely more so in the sight of God. This is sufficiently evident in the conduct of the divine Being in relation to it. The prominent place he has given to the law forbidding it—having written it in common with nine others, on tables of stone, for the universal government of universal man—and, also, the sanction he has placed upon it—having announced it amid the most sublime and awful symbols of the divine presence which the world ever witnessed—these considerations make it abundantly evident that God looks upon unchastity with the extreme of loathing and abhorrence.
This view, however, is farther evidenced in the fact that throughout both Testaments, unchastity is made the subject of frequent rebuke, in language of the greatest detestation. Against no other form of sin are men more frequently and earnestly admonished.
EFFECTS OF UNCHASTITY UPON THE BODY.
“Sexual desire, cherished by the mind, and dwelt upon by the imagination, not only increases the excitability and peculiar sensibility of the genital organs themselves; but always throws an influence equal to the intensity of the affection, over the whole nervous domain; disturbing all the functions depending on them for vital energy, which is thereby increased upon or distracted from them—and if this excitement is frequently repeated or long continued, it inevitably induces an increased degree of irritability and debility and relaxation generally, throughout the whole nervous and muscular tissues, and especially the nerves of organic life. And hence, those lascivious DAY DREAMS and amorous reveries, in which young people—and especially the idle and the voluptuous, and the sedentary and the nervous are exceedingly apt to indulge, are often the sources of general debility, effeminacy, disordered functions, and premature disease, and even premature death, without the actual37exercise of the genital organs! Indeed, this unchastity of thought—this adultery of the mind—is the beginning of immeasurable evil to the human family.”—Graham’s Lectures to Young Men, p. 57.
SOLITARY VICE.
Testimony to the evil effects of solitary vice comes in from all quarters. Dr. Clarke, the excellent commentator, says that self-pollution “excites the powers to undue action, and produces violent secretions, which necessarily and speedily exhaust the vital principle and energy.” The Doctor goes on to speak of its consequences, as disease and death, and then adds: “Reader, this is no caricature, nor are the colors overcharged in this shocking picture. Worse woes than my pen can relate, I have witnessed in those addicted to this fascinating, unnatural and most destructive of crimes. If thou hast entered the snare, flee from the destruction of both soul and body that awaits thee.”
Physiology also bears its testimony. Says Sylvester Graham, “By far the worst form of venereal indulgence is self-pollution.” This testimony perfectly accords with that of the divine quoted above. Says Mrs. Gove, the celebrated physiological lecturess, “There is hardly an end to these diseases,”—diseases caused by solitary vice. Says the Rev. E. M. P. Wells, teacher in the school of moral discipline, Boston, “Respecting the habit of sexual self-indulgence, I should hope it was unnecessary to speak of its dangerous and evil effects.”
Wm. C. Woodbridge, well known to the educational world, speaks of it as a “solitary but fatal vice, spreading desolation through our schools and families, unnoticed or unknown.” Tissot speaks of it as the cause of painful, long, disgusting disease. Says Dr. Woodward, the justly celebrated superintendent of the Mass. State Lunatic Hospital, “A great number of the ills which come upon the young at and after the age of puberty, arise from this habit, persisted in so long38as to waste the vital energies, and enervate the physical and mental powers of the man.”
Todd, in his Student’s Manual, p. 147, says, “I have known very many young persons, who have daily polluted themselves with this vice—and that, too, for a number of years. . . . . I have lamented the fall of many whom I have seen fall victims to premature death, for this foul cause alone,—some, while in the halls of education, and others soon after leaving college, adorned with its higher honors.”
We have already heard Mrs. Gove say, “There is hardly an end to these diseases,” (diseases caused by this vice.) She enumerates “dyspepsia, spinal complaint, headache, epilepsy, impaired eyesight, palpitation of the heart, pain in the side, bleeding at the lungs, spasms of the heart and lungs, diabetes, or incontinence of urine, fluor albus, or whites, inflammation of the urinary organs.” Dr. Deslandes, besides many of these, instances rheumatism, affected perspiration, consumption, asthma, catarrh, polypus of the heart, affection of the bones, fevers, priapism strangury, polypus uteri, blood discharges, &c., &c.
The following startling case occurred but a few miles from the residence of the writer. It is received on credible information. A boy, about four years old, was afflicted with weakness and stiffness of limbs. (The exact symptoms the writer has not learned.) His parents at length carried him to a distant physician. The physician, after sufficient inquiry, told them that the child “handled himself too much.” They returned, doubting what this could mean. Suggesting the matter to some of their neighbors, their eyes were opened. “Well,” said they, “we will stop that.” And they did stop it, by bandaging the genitals. And lo! the child soon stopped being feeble and lame. He is now a healthy boy.
Dr. Goupil, as quoted by Deslandes, gives a full and particular account of a little boy who at two years old was epileptic, from this cause. The vice was taught him by his nurse. We say taught him—perhaps we should say fastened upon him at early infancy only as a notion. A notion, however, which hurried on excitement39and rendered him paralytic. By the most vigilant use of mechanical means for confining the hands, covering the genitals, &c., the child was at length cured; he now enjoys good health, “and with the exception of a remarkable loss of memory, retains no trace of his former indiscretions.”
Instances like the above are, doubtless, of very rare occurrence, and when they do occur, must be supposed to be the result of the combined action of all the circumstances, constitutional and external, favorable to their development. That the debasing habit is often commenced before puberty, and, in the language of an eminent physiological observer, “frequently many years before,” is, however, quite indisputable.
But after all, very little of the mischief of this sin is known. It is a secret vice; a vice which its patrons are ashamed to confess. And hence, provided they themselves know it to be the cause of their suffering, they are slow to acknowledge it. Or, if knowing this, they abandon it, and so get well; feeling under no obligation to publish their indiscretion, some medicinal nostrum obtains all the credit of their cure. And further, if knowing its evils they persist in it, in spite of them, why, they have then no motive for exposing it. But if, as is generally the case, they are ignorant of its injuriousness, then certainly, they will not reveal it. So that, every way, the conclusion forces itself upon us, that comparatively very little of the mischief of solitary vice is known. Indeed, very little of it is known to the victims themselves. Much less, then, to the community. This will appear still more evident in the fact that it is only quite recently that many discoveries calculated to excite any general alarm and inquiry have been made—and also in the fact that the more general effects of the vice, being only a sort of general debility, are not among the ignorant masses calculated to excite much careful inquiry, into their causes. Upon the whole, it must plainly appear that what are known of the consequences of solitary vice, can, at most, be regarded only as indices to what actually exist.
This evil is confined to neither sex. Its ravages,40though not as extensive, are, however, most dreadful among the females. We have before us numerous published cases of the horrible nature, taken from the history of both sexes.
The foregoing are among the causes which at present occur to our mind for the pre-eminently sad physical consequences of solitary vice. But whatever view the reader take of these causes, we charge him never to hazard their consequences! And this charge we give in the name of his own health and life. Whatever be his or her age, and however temperate he resolve to be, he must not indulge in this sin. Total abstinence must be his law. One glass excites the appetite for another. One enemy admitted, another clamors for admission; while the one admitted is weakening his power of resistance. In a word, in the language of Deslandes, “it is clear that there is no possible security for the Onanist.” But especially let every praying man, either cease to sip of this cup of foulness, or cease to pray “lead us not into temptation.” Otherwise “his prayer itself will become sin.”
EFFECTS OF UNCHASTITY UPON THE MIND.
Unchastity, as we have already seen, deranges, debilitates and ruins the body. Now, out of this startling fact, arises another fact, if possible, more startling. It is that unchastity deranges, debilitates and ruins the mind. That this latter fact must follow the former is clear in the consideration, that the body is the seat of the mind, and the medium through which it acts. The mind gets its simple ideas through the medium of the body. And in proportion to the perfectness of this medium does the mind improve. But when the body is debilitated, languid, sick, it is injured, and ruined as a medium for the action of the mind. Consequently the mind is then shut up to itself in weakness and destitution. Moreover, the mind increases its stock of knowledge and its energy by reflection upon its ideas. So that on ideas, by reflection, ideas grow. But when the body is feeble and sick, reflection cannot be supported. (Witness the41case of thousands of invalids.) As, then, reflection is necessary to mental improvement, and as a sound body is necessary to clear and continued reflection, so is a sound body necessary to high mental improvement. Once more—the ability of the mind to use the knowledge it has, is dependent upon the body. Thus, whatever weakens the body, in so far locks up the mental treasure-house against even itself. But unchastity does weaken and debilitate the body, and by consequence, as we have above seen, the mind also. But to be a little more particular.
1. By unchastity, especially by solitary vice, the mind suffers lassitude. By lassitude, we mean that dozy indifference, which the victims of venereal excesses often feel. To be sure, sensation and conscious energy, may be, for a time, and at intervals exalted, under the influence of this unnaturalness. But unless they be exalted to the point of insanity, the system soon relapses, and sinks into the condition above mentioned. This condition is the perfectly natural result of the exhaustion of the nervous energy upon the venereal passion. It is indicated by a general feeling of irresolution, and this more especially in the morning. Students, so many of them as are vicious, are the sorest sufferers from it. And, in general, persons of sedentary habits are most liable to it, although no victim of solitary vice is safe from it. Says Dr. Deslandes, “Young men who previously showed considerable vivacity of mind and aptitude for study, become, after being addicted to this habit, (solitary vice) stupid and incapable of applying themselves: it is evident that this transitory state which immediately succeeds the act of venery, becomes continued when this act is frequently repeated, because time is not allowed for the effects of it to pass off.”—But if unchastity—more especially solitary vice—unfits students for their work, so does it young farmers, mechanics, seamstresses, &c. for theirs. It is always and every where, “evil, only evil, and that continually.”
2. By unchastity, especially by solitary vice, the mind suffers permanent debility. Dr. Woodward says that loss of memory and power of application show the42devastating effects of solitary vice upon the mind. Says Todd in his Student’s Manual, “Remember that the fruits of this habit (solitary vice) are, (1) great debility of the memory, (2) great prostration and foolish imbecility of the mind.”
But while the memory suffers so much from this vice that it has been marked by all who have written upon this subject, still it does not suffer alone. All the mental faculties partake of the general blight. Perception is made dull and obtuse, the reasoning powers are blunted. Nothing is seen clearly—nothing is understood perfectly. The whole mental man is sunk; and this, more or less, according to the degree of venereal abuse. To all this the reflecting reader will assent.
3. From debility the mind often sinks into idiocy. We have already seen that Dr. Woodward reckons idiocy among the consequences of solitary vice. And it is no marvel that whatever induces mental lassitude and debility, should finally induce vacant idiocy itself. The tendency is all that way. “Last fall,” says the author of “Facts and Important Information,” &c., “I saw a young woman in a town in Massachusetts who had made herself an idiot by masturbation. A most miserable creature she was. Her looks and gestures were indescribable; licentiousness, like a foul plague, had blasted everything beautiful in her face, everything noble and lovely in her soul.” Says Dr. Clarke, by this vice the mind is “often debilitated even to idiotism.”
In the fall of 1844, the writer visited the Massachusetts State Lunatic Hospital. While being conducted through the various apartments, mingling promiscuously with the insane, our attention was suddenly and effectually arrested by the peculiarly haggard, frantic, wild, and fiendish appearance of a young man, turning from us with his eye turned back over his shoulder. Struck with his shocking aspect, we inquired of our attendant, a young physician, what was the cause of his insanity. “Solitary vice,” was the ready reply. Thought we, solitary vice produces solitary insanity! For we never saw the like before. We further asked,43Have you many here from that cause? “A large proportion,” was the reply. More than from intemperance? “Oh yes, far more.” Do you find ladies alike victims of that practice? “We know no difference.” We were now passing through a large room where a number of beautiful and apparently intelligent young ladies sat gazing mutely upon us. But, Dr., what are your prospects of cure in such cases? “When there is reason enough left to make the patients see and feel that by abandoning the habit they may be cured, we have good hope; but not otherwise.” This last sentiment agrees perfectly with a remark of Deslandes’, that “when they (crazy persons) do indulge, this act must be considered as a bad symptom, since it constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to the cure: it destroys the strength, and finally produces, in the patients, stupidity, phthisis, marasmus, and death.” And surely nothing but death was wanting to fill this picture in the case of the young man to whom we have just alluded.
EFFECTS OF LICENTIOUSNESS UPON THE MORALS.
Lust fills the chambers of the whole soul with moral pestilence and mildew; and this, too, whatever be its mode of operating. So that solitary vice, in its depraving power, falls but little short of libertinism itself. Its tendency is downward—downward—DOWNWARD! It rapidly weakens and debases the moral character, especially if the sinfulness of it be known. We have already seen how often it hurries its victims to insanity. But far more frequently it sinks them deep in depravity without destroying their accountability. It is the parent of very much of that moral corruption so generally ascribed to the fall of Adam! Sapping the moral nature early, it saps it effectually. Reason and conscience, struggling ineffectually for a season, at length throw loose the controlling reins, and then the work is done. Few, if any, confirmed onanists, but are depraved to the level of any and every form of venereal sin. And certainly they who are thus depraved, will shrink from very few acts of crime,44whenever their interest or their passion shall summon them to wickedness. Selfish and interested motives may, to be sure, afford many, and sometimes strong, restraints. But when right—right in the sight of God—moral right is the only question, it is believed that the subjects of licentiousness will generally care but little for it.