The natural outcome of the child reasoning will be, if one woman can kiss a man and sit upon his lap, then all women can kiss men and sit upon their laps. Why not reason in this way? No one has ever taken the trouble to explain the difference between the married and the unmarried state and the rights and privileges that belong to the wedded pair, which rights are recognized by both God and the laws of our land.
Natural Mating
If you will observe them, children mate as naturally as the birds do. Here they are dancing about us like the sunbeams in the forest, in pairs of natural selection. You may notice them in the home, in the school and on the streets. Innocent little things they are in these childish matings and might remain so to the end of life if some kind intelligence were directing them. But no such intelligence is at hand. The mothers joke about these matings and tease the children about them and that is the end of the parents’ relation to this gravest question in all life.
These children grow to fourteen or fifteen years of age and the impulses from the sex nerve center begin to flood themselves out in a perfect submergence of the life. They get hold of some silly love stories, that have been written by some heartless person for so much per line, and were never intended for any normal person to believe or think possible, but to their childish minds it is a chapter from real life, for they are not in any sense normal beings at this age as you will see by a look at the triangle. At this age the intelligence is but a mere pigmy in their lives as compared to the giants of feeling and physical life.
Ignorance Brings Ruin
Seeing and knowing no danger in it, they follow out the natural sex impulse to touch one another and to caress each other. Why not? Have they not read in the love story of the lover and the sweetheart kissing and caressing each other, and furthermore, and the strongest possible evidence in the case, have they not seen father and mother kiss and caress each other? Is it not the most natural thing, under these conditions, for these children to enter into such familiar relations as will lead to serious consequences in many cases?
I know many a girl has lived through this period of ignorant familiarity with young men without having her character wholly ruined, and she appears before those of us who know the danger through which she has passed, as a living miracle.
But having escaped these dangers herself, what has she done for the young man with whom she has had these familiar relations? She has, unwittingly of course, multiplied the sex impulses in his life till they sweep over him like a fire in the forest. He is a manly young fellow and would scorn the thought even of allowing these impulses to expend themselves upon the one who had awakened them and increased their outflooding. In the midst of these experiences he falls in with some young man older than himself, and they talk it over. This fellow prides himself on being worldly wise, and so the younger man is influenced by him. The result is that he goes to someone who will receive him for a money consideration. Then comes the awful awakening, and he recognizes the fact, that the blighting leprosy of the sin of lewdness has fastened itself upon him. But after the first shock his heart is lightened, because some physician assures him that he can cure him. But that man is either ignorant or he is wilfully deceiving this young man, for the Almighty himself cannot assure him that this plague will ever entirely leave his body. God will forgive his soul, but no one can honestly assure him that his body is not damned for all time. It is true some men seem to recover entirely, but no one can give them any assurance in this matter. The best medical science tells us that these germs may remain in the body for years and then show themselves in various forms and diseases.