JUST in proportion as the perpetuation of the race is more important than the existence of any single individual, the organs of reproduction may in a… - John Harvey Kellogg

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, 26, 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 multitude 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 lewd criticism every passing 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 clubroom. They do not, of course, often descend to those black depths of vulgarity to which the coarser sex will go, but couch in finer terms the same foul thoughts, and hide in loose insinuations more smut 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 chastity 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.

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.

Drugs, Rings, etc.-If drugs, “per se”, will cure invalids of any class, they are certainly worthless in this class of patients. The whole material medica affords no root, herb, extract, or compound that alone will cure a person suffering from emissions. Thousands of unfortunates have been ruined by long-continued drugging. One physician will purge and salivate the patient. Another will dose him with phosphorus, quinine, or ergot. Another feeds him with iron. Another plies him with lipuline, camphor, and digitaline. Still another narcotizes him with opium, belladonna, and chloral. Purgatives and diuretics are given by another, and some will be found ready to empty the whole pharmacopoeia into the poor sufferer’s stomach if he can be got to open his mouth wide enough. The way that some of these poor fellows are blistered, and burned, and cauterized, and tortured in sundry other ways, is almost too horrible to think of; yet they endure it, often willingly, thinking it but just punishment for their sins, and perhaps hoping to expiate them by this cruel penance. By those procedures, the emissions are sometimes temporarily checked, but the patient is not cured, nevertheless, and the malady soon returns. The employment of rings, pessaries, and numerous other mechanical devices for preventing emissions, is entirely futile. No dependence can be placed upon them. Some of these contrivances are very ingenious, but they are all worthless, and time and money spent upon them are thrown away.