The Ladies Book of Useful Information, Anonymous [rocket ebook reader txt] 📗

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,