3. Avoid watching for symptoms. Ills are greatly exaggerated by dwelling upon them. One can easily imagine himself getting worse when he is really getting better. Indeed, one can make himself sick by dwelling upon insignificant symptoms. Fix upon a course to pursue for recovery, firmly resolve to comply with every requirement necessary to insure success, and then let the mind be entirely at rest respecting the result.
4. Never consult a quack. The newspapers abound with lying advertisements of remedies for diseases of this character. Do not waste time and money in corresponding with the ignorant, unprincipled charlatans who make such false pretensions. Do not consult traveling doctors. Physicians of real merit have plenty of business at home. They are not obliged to go abroad in order to secure practice. Persons who resort to this course are, without exception, pretentious quacks. Consult only some well-known and reliable physician in whom you have confidence. If your physician treats the matter lightly, and advises marriage as a means of cure, you will not judge him harshly if you decide that although he may be thoroughly competent to treat other diseases, he is ignorant of the nature and proper treatment of this. It is an unfortunate fact that there are many physicians who are not thoroughly acquainted with the nature of spermatorrhoea and the proper mode of treating the disease; hence the importance of making a judicious selection in choosing a medical adviser. If possible, employ one whom you know to have treated successfully numerous similar cases, and give him your entire confidence. It is far better to consult your family physician than to trust yourself in the hands of some one whom you do not know, and especially one who makes great pretensions to knowledge.
5. Do not despair of ever recovering from the effects of past transgression, and plunge into greater depths of sin. Persevering, skillful treatment will cure almost every case. Even the worst cases can be greatly benefited if the earnest co-operation of the patient can be secured. This is indispensable, and the patient should be so instructed at the outset of a course of treatment.
6. Every sufferer from sexual disease must make up his mind to live, during the remainder of his life, as closely in accord with the laws of life and health as circumstances under his control will allow him to do. One who pursues this course, with a genuine regard for principle and a love for right, may confidently expect to receive the reward of obedience for his faithfulness. We would recommend such to obtain and study the best works upon hygiene, put in practice every new truth as soon as learned, and become missionaries of the saving truths of hygiene to others who are suffering from the same cause as themselves, or who may be in danger of falling into the same evil.
[A CHAPTER FOR BOYS.]
Boys, this chapter is for you. It is written and printed purposely for you. If you do not read another word in the book, read these few pages if you are old enough to do so. Read each line carefully and thoughtfully. You may not find anything to make you laugh—possibly you may: but you will be certain to find something of almost inestimable value to you in every line.
[Who are Boys?]—Boys are scarce now-a-days. In the days of Methuselah, male human beings were still boys when nearly a century old; twenty-five years ago boys were still such until well out of their "teens"; now the interval between infancy and the age at which the boy becomes a young man is so brief that boyhood is almost a thing of the past. The happy period of care-free, joyous innocence which formerly intervened between childhood and early manhood is now almost unobservable. Boys grow old too fast. They learn to imitate the vices and the manners of their seniors before they reach their teens, and are impatient to be counted as men, no matter how great may be their deficiencies, their unfitness for the important duties and responsibilities of life. The consequence of this inordinate haste and impatience to be old, is premature decay. Unfortunately the general tendency of the young members of the rising generation is to copy the vices of their elders, rather than the virtues of true manliness. A strong evidence of this fact, if there were no other, is the unnaturally old-looking faces which so many of our boys present. At the present time the average boy of twelve knows more of vice and sin than the youth of twenty of the past generation.
It is not so much for these human mushrooms, which may be not inaptly compared to toadstools which grow up in a single night and almost as speedily decay, that we write, but for the old-fashioned boys, the few such there may be, those who have not yet learned to love sin, those whose minds are still pure and uncontaminated. Those who have already begun a course of vice and wickedness we have little hope of reforming; but we are anxious to offer a few words of counsel and warning which may possibly help to save as brands plucked from a blazing fire, those whose moral sense is yet alive, who have quick and tender consciences, who aspire to be truly noble and good.
[What are Boys for?]—This question was answered with exact truthfulness by a little boy, who, when contemptuously accosted by a man with the remark, "What are you good for?" replied, "Men are made of such as we." Boys are the beginnings of men. They sustain the same relation to men that the buds do to full-blown flowers. They are still more like the small green apples which first appear when the blossoms drop from the branches, compared with the ripe, luscious fruit which in autumn bends the heavy-laden boughs almost to breaking. Often, like the young apples, boys are green; but this is only natural, and should be considered no disgrace to the boys. If they grow up naturally they will ripen with age, like the fruit, developing at each successive stage of life additional attractions and excellent qualities.