In the oldest chronicle of the human race the historian of the patriarchs has preserved a genealogical record which seems to have been transmitted for the special purpose of showing the casual connection of continence and longevity. That record (the fifth chapter of Genesis) states the age and the marriage date of the progenitors of ten different generations, with a regularly correspondent decrease of period in both respects, from the first to the sixth, when both increase in a single instance and then decrease to the end of the list. The lessons of that record might be read in every branch of every genealogical chronicle from Noah to the latest posterity of his sons. In all countries, among all nations of all times, premature courtship has courted premature death. Continence during the years of development rewards itself in health and vigor, both of body and of mind. Success in every line of endeavor is the reward of reserved strength. That strength becomes available in the needs of after years, and is the chief basis of that love of independence and impatience of tyranny found only among manful and continent nations. The love of the gentlest females is reserved for the manliest males of their species, while precocious coveters of such prizes meet with humiliations and disappointments. Those who forbear to anticipate the promptings of Nature can rely on the favor of her undiminished aid; and to such only is given the power of that “love that spurs to exertions.”
And if marriages are planned in heaven, that [[50]]heaven manifests its will in the appeals of love, and not in the counsels of avarice or expedience. If the sorrows of poverty-straitened love could be measured against the misery of disgust blighted wealth, it would be admitted that the course of true love is, after all, the smoothest, in the long run as well as in the beginning. For the inspirations of genuine love will resist the assaults of misfortune as they defied its menace, and the ban of prejudice can detract but little from the happiness of a union hallowed by the sanction of Nature.
C.—PERVERSION.
The enemies of Nature have not failed to pervert an instinct which they could not wholly suppress. That this suppression was actually attempted in the first outbreak of antinatural insanity is abundantly proved by the history of the early Christian sects, the Novatians, the Marcionites, and the followers of self-mutilating Origenes. Absolute abstinence from sexual intercourse was made the chief text of “unworldliness.” Novices were brought up in strict seclusion; mutilation was the usual penalty of violated vows, but was also practiced as an à-priori safeguard against the awakening of the sexual instinct. St. Clemens of Alexandria, one of the few semi-rational leaders of the patristic era, gives an appalling account of the consequences of those crimes against Nature, and vehemently denounces the fatuous dogma, which was nevertheless only modified, but never wholly renounced, by the moralists of a church whose ethics were undoubtedly derived from the physical nihilism [[51]]of Buddha Sakiamuni. The Galilean apostle of Antinaturalism indirectly inculcates the superior merit of suppression in his allusions to “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” and the saints “who neither marry nor are given in marriage,” as well as in the example of his personal asceticism; and Paul distinctly informs us that marriage is only a lesser evil, a compromise with the passions of the unregenerate, which perfect virtue should forbear to gratify: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman; nevertheless to avoid …,” etc. Such dogmas bore their natural fruit in the society-shunning fanaticism of hermits and anchorites; in aberrations à la Origenes, and in that dreadful source of unnatural vice, the enforced celibacy of monks and priests.
In the philosophy of those moralists, the physical interests of mankind were of no moment whatever. The church that burnt nuns and priests for yielding to the power of an irrepressible instinct, has in millions of cases sanctioned the nuptials of immature minors and the nature-insulting unions of avarice and flunkeyism. For the sake of a small fee it has encouraged the marriage of reluctant paupers, but howled its anathemas against the unions of orthodox Christians with gentiles, Jews, or Christian dissenters. Thus encouraged, Christian parents have not hesitated to sacrifice the highest interests of their children and children’s children to considerations of “expedience.” In Spanish America thousands of baby-brides—girls of twelve and thirteen; nay, even of ten years—are delivered to the marital tyranny of wealthy old debauchees; in France, Italy, and Austria [[52]]millions of mutually reluctant boys and girls are compelled to wed in obedience to the decision of a business committee of relatives and panders. In the cities of the northland nations marriages of expedience, though rarer, are still of daily occurrence. “Whatever is natural is wrong,” was the shibboleth of the medieval dogmatists, and the protests of instinct were suppressed in the name of morality.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Next to dietetic abuses, premature and unfit marriage is undoubtedly the most fruitful cause of the degeneration of the human species. The penalties of Nature, which every husbandman knows to avoid in the case of his cattle, are recklessly risked by parents and guardians of helpless children—perhaps in the vague hope that the normal consequences might be averted by the intercession of supernatural agencies. But miracles have ceased to suspend the operation of Nature’s laws, and it would not be an over-estimate to say that a hundred million Christians annually incur the penalty of moral or physical sufferings and premature death, as a retribution of their own or their parents’ outrages against the laws of the sexual instinct. Premature intercourse of the sexes stunts the further development of the organism and entails physical defects on the offspring of a series of successive generations. Puny, weakly, and scrofulous children people the cities of southern Europe from Havre to Messina, though infant mortality has assumed proportions which partly counteract [[53]]the evil by the sternest of Nature’s remedies. Our fatuous modes of indoor education, combined with the influence of a stimulating diet (meat, pepper-sauces, and coffee, instead of fruit, bread, and milk) systematically promote premature prurience. Our school-boys are thus driven to vices of which they know neither the name nor the physiological significance, though, like the victims of convent-life, they suffer the consequences—
Losing their beauty and their native grace,