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tunate! He has sinned against God, against nature, and against himself. He has violated the laws of the Creator; has disfigured the image of God in his own person, and has changed it into that of the beast, imago bestice. He is even sunken below the brute, and, like him, looks only upon the ground. His dull and stupid glance can no longer raise itself toward Heaven; he no longer dares lift his miserable brow, already stamped with the seal of reprobation; he descends little by little into death, and a last convulsive crisis comes at length, violently to close this strange and horrible drama."
As we have said of the physical, so also can we say of the moral punishment of the masturbator. Not all offenders are visited so severely as above described. Perhaps even a small proportion of the whole number die in this manner; yet, in this comparatively small minority, those who persist in the practice will sooner or Inter surely be included. Let no one delude himself with the false assumption that he can be exempt from this universal law. There can be no possible exemption! Those who persist will surely die the death most horrible of all deaths; and those who practice the most limited and most occasional acts of onanism will surely be punished in proportion to their crimes; while the very individuals who seem to escape, are those who most surely carry the punishment for the remainder of their lives, never live to attain old age, and most frequently fall victims to some grave chronic disease, the germs of which they owe to this detestable vice. Or an acute malady, which they resist far less readily than others, cuts the thread of their existence in the prime of their manhood.
Let those who read these pages reflect upon the numberless instances, which must have come within the observa-
