Part 10 (1/2)
Mental Unchast.i.ty.--It is vain for a man to suppose himself chaste who allows his imagination to run riot amid scenes of amorous a.s.sociations.
The man whose lips delight in tales of licentiousness, whose eyes feast upon obscene pictures, who is ever ready to pervert the meaning of a harmless word or act into uncleanness, who finds delight in reading vivid portrayals of acts of lewdness,--such a one is not a virtuous man. Though he may never have committed an overt act of unchast.i.ty, if he cannot pa.s.s a handsome female in the street without, in imagination, approaching the secrets of her person, he is but one grade above the open libertine, and is as truly unchaste as the veriest debauchee.
Man may not see these mental adulteries, he may not perceive these filthy imaginings; but One sees and notes them. They leave their hideous scars upon the soul. They soil and mar the mind; and as the record of each day of life is photographed upon the books in Heaven, they each appear in bold relief, in all their innate hideousness.
O purity! how rare a virtue! How rare to find a face which shows no trace of sensuality! One turns with sadness from the thought that human ”forms divine” have sunk so low. The standard of virtue is trailing in the dust. Men laugh at vice, and sneer at purity. The bawdy laugh, the ribald jest, the sensual glance, the obscene song, the filthy tale, salute the eyes and ears at every street corner, in the horse-car, on the railroad train, in the bar-room, the lecture hall, the workshop.
In short, the works and signs of vice are omnipresent.
Foul thoughts, once allowed to enter the mind, stick like the leprosy.
They corrode, contaminate, and infect like the pestilence; naught but Almighty power can deliver from the bondage of concupiscence a soul once infected by this foul blight, this moral contagium.
Mental Uncleanness.--It is a wide-spread and deadly error, that only outward acts are harmful; that only physical transgression of the laws of chast.i.ty will produce disease. We have seen all the effects of beastly abuse result from mental sin alone.
”I have traced serious affections and very great suffering to this cause.
The cases may occur at any period of life. We meet with them frequently among such as are usually called, or think themselves, continent young men. There are large cla.s.ses of persons who seem to think that they may, without moral guilt, excite their own feelings or those of others by loose or libidinous conversation in society, provided such impure thoughts or acts are not followed by masturbation or fornication. I have almost daily to tell such persons that physically, and in a sanitary point of view, they are ruining their const.i.tutions. There are young men who almost pa.s.s their lives in making carnal acquaintances in the street, but just stop short of seducing girls; there are others who haunt the lower cla.s.ses of places of public amus.e.m.e.nt for the purpose of s.e.xual excitement, and live, in fact, a thoroughly immoral life in all respects except actually going home with prost.i.tutes. When these men come to me, laboring under the various forms of impotence, they are surprised at my suggesting to them the possibility of the impairment of their powers being dependent upon these previous vicious habits.”[4]
[Footnote 4: Acton.]
”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, premature disease, and even premature death, without the actual exercise of the genital organs! Indeed, this unchast.i.ty of thought--this adultery of the mind--is the beginning of immeasurable evil to the human family.”[5]
[Footnote 5: Graham.]
Amativeness.--Certain phrenologists contend that the controlling center of the s.e.xual pa.s.sion is the cerebellum, or little brain, which is situated at the lower and back part of the head. They apparently love to dwell upon the theme, and ride their hobby upon all possible occasions, often in the most disgusting manner, and always leaving the impression that they must be themselves suffering from perversion of the very function of which they speak.
There may be some doubt whether the function called amativeness is located in the cerebellum at all; at least, it is perfectly certain that amativeness is not the exclusive function of the cerebellum. Says Carpenter, the learned physiologist, ”The seat of the s.e.xual sensation is no longer supposed to be in the cerebellum generally; but probably in its central portion, or some part of the medulla oblongata.”
The cerebellum is intimately connected with the princ.i.p.al vital organs; hence, if it is largely developed, the individual will possess a well-developed physical organism and a good degree of const.i.tutional vigor. He will have vigorous health, and probably strong s.e.xual powers; not, however, as a special function, but for the same reason that he will have a good digestion.
To the majority of mankind, apparently, amativeness, or s.e.xual love, means l.u.s.t. The faculty has been lowered and debased until it might almost be considered practically synonymous with sensuality. The first step toward reform must be a recognition of a higher and purer relation than that which centers every thought upon the gratification of the animal in human nature. If one may judge from the facts which now and then come to the surface in society, it would appear that the opportunity for sensual gratification had come to be, in the world at large, the chief attraction between the s.e.xes. If to these observations we add the filthy disclosures constantly made in police courts and scandal suits, we have a powerful confirmation of the opinion. Even ministers, who ought to be ”ensamples to the flock,” are rather ”blind leaders of the blind,” and fall into the same ditch with the rest.
This perversion of a natural instinct, and these sudden lapses from virtue which startle a small portion of community and afford a filthy kind of pleasure to the other part, are but the outgrowths of mental unchast.i.ty. ”Filthy dreamers,” before they are aware, become filthy in action. The thoughts mold the brain, as certainly as the brain molds the thoughts. Rapidly down the current of sensuality is swept the individual who yields his imagination to the contemplation of lascivious themes. Before he knows his danger, he finds himself deep in the mire of concupiscence. He may preserve a fair exterior; but deception cannot cleanse the slime from his putrid soul. How many a church-member carries under a garb of piety a soul filled with abominations, no human scrutiny can tell. How many pulpits are filled by ”whited sepulchers,” only the Judgment will disclose.
Unchaste Conversation.--”Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” ”Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of Judgment.” ”By thy words thou shalt be condemned.” Matt. 12: 34, 36, 37. In these three brief sentences, Christ presents the whole moral aspect of the subject of this paragraph. To any one who will ponder well his weighty words, no further remark is necessary. Let filthy talkers but consider for a moment what a mult.i.tude of ”idle,” unclean words are waiting for account in the final day; and then let them consider what a load of condemnation must roll upon their guilty souls when strict justice is meted out to every one before the bar of Omnipotence, and in the face of all the world--of all the universe.
The almost universal habit among boys and young men of relating filthy stories, indulging in foul jokes, making indecent allusions, and subjecting to lewd criticism every pa.s.sing female, is a most abominable sin. Such habits crush out pure thoughts; they annihilate respect for virtue; they make the mind a quagmire of obscenity; they lead to overt acts of lewdness.
But boys and youths are not alone in this. More often than otherwise, they gain from older ones the phraseology of vice. And if the sin is loathsome in such youthful transgressors, what detestable enormity must characterize it in the old.
And women, too, are not without their share in this accursed thing, this ghost of vice, which haunts the sewing-circle and the parlor as well as the club-room. They do not, of course, often descend to those black depths of vulgarity to which the coa.r.s.er s.e.x will go, but couch in finer terms the same foul thoughts, and hide in loose insinuations more s.m.u.t than words could well express. Women who think themselves rare paragons of virtue can find no greater pleasure than in the discussion of the latest scandal, speculations about the chast.i.ty of Mrs. A. or Mr. B., and gossip about the ”fall” of this man's daughter or the amorous adventures of that woman's son.
Masculine purity loves to regard woman as chaste in mind as well as in body, to surround her with conceptions of purity and impregnable virtue; but the conclusion is irresistible that those who can gloat over others' lapses from virtue, and find delight in such questionable entertainments as the most recent case of seduction, or the newest scandal, have need to purify their hearts and re-enforce their waning chast.i.ty. Nevertheless, a writer says, and perhaps truly, that ”the women comprise about all the real virtue there is in the world.”
Certainly if they were one-half as bad as the masculine portion of humanity, the world would be vastly worse than it is.
Causes of Unchast.i.ty.--Travelers among the North American Indians have been struck with the almost entire absence of that abandonment to vice which might be expected in a race uninfluenced by the moral restraints of Christianity. When first discovered in their native wilds, they were free from both the vices and the consequent diseases of civilization.
This fact points unmistakably to the conclusion that there must be something in the refinements and perversions of civilized life which is unfavorable to chast.i.ty, notwithstanding all the restraints which religion and the conventionalisms of society impose. Can we find such influences? Yes; they abound on every hand and leave their blight in most unwelcome places, oft unsuspected, even, till the work of ruin is complete.
Early Causes.--The earliest of all causes is hereditary predisposition.
As we have shown, a child conceived in l.u.s.t can no more be chaste by nature than a negro can be a Caucasian. But back of this there is a deeper cause, as we shall see, one that affects parents as well as offspring. Between infancy and p.u.b.erty, are in operation, all those influences mentioned under ”s.e.xual Precocity.”