IN all the history of the world there never was a grander period in which to live than the present.  Never before was there so much to minister to physical comfort, to healthful recreation.  The fruits of all climes, the products of all nations, and the resources of the whole earth were never before laid at the feet of man in such abundance and profusion as now.  Good books and inspiring influences were never before so numerous as to-day.  Institutions of learning, colleges, universities are all open to rich and poor alike.  The same is true also in commercial and professional life.  While crowded in their earlier beginnings, yet the highest, noblest and best they have to bestow were never before offered in such abundance as to-day to those who have the physical, intellectual and moral endowment for their attainment.  The Church and the State, indeed all the walks and departments of life, are open as never before to young men of brain and brawn; but capacity and power  are nevertheless made the indispensable requisites to eminence or even success.

   The world has always worshipped strength.  The greatness of kingdoms has often been measured by the strength of their armies.  The savage and uncivilized tribes chose the tallest and most stalwart for their leaders and kings.  Even Saul was chosen King over Israel because he stood head and shoulders above all the rest of his fellows.  In  the United States it is not size or physical prowess, but political strength -- strength at the polls -- that commends the man for political preferment and place.  That the value of physical strength is, nevertheless, being more and more justly prized in this country, is indicated by the increasing amount of time given to the athletic departments in all our institutions of learning, the multiplication of gymnasiums in connection with our Young Men's Christian Associations, and many other institutions.  It is also indicated in the growing favor with which physical culture and all outdoor sports are welcomed and cultivated, and the larger amount of time devoted to croquet, tennis, golf, ball, bicycling and all other forms of outdoor recreation.  As a result, men are stronger, have greater powers of physical endurance, live longer, suffer less from sickness, and are able to accomplish more now than in any other period in the world's history.  The man who enters the race for success in either business or professional circles cannot afford to neglect the cultivation of his physical powers.  A man without health is handicapped in the beginning.  A man with a weak body, other things being equal, lacks the essential leverage to accomplish as much as those who have greater powers of endurance. 

   While the physical must ever constitute an indispensable foundation, yet that which distinguishes and crowns man is not found in his physical nature.  Many of the lower animals are stronger than man.  Even the ox surpasses him in strength, the birds rise above him and surpass him in flight,  the eye of the eagle is superior to that of man, the bee surpasses him in industry, and even the little ant has always been to him an example of tireless perseverance. 

   The noblest and grandest thing in the world is a young man in all the vigor and buoyancy of manhood, and with all the promise of long life and great usefulness before him.  The young man with broad shoulders and deep chest, with strong muscles and intellectual forehead -- a veritable son of God -- is the grandest object in the entire world.  That which elevates man and places him next to his Creator in the scale of being found in the fact that God created man in His own image.  God gave him intelligence, gave him a  moral sense and a spiritual nature, and these elevate him immeasurably above all other creatures of God's hand.  Without these he is not qualified to rule over all the lower forms of creation; his intellectual, moral and spiritual endowments make him in the rightful lord of creation, and no creature can successfully resist his dominion.

   Man's highest culture is found in the symmetrical development of his threefold nature -- the physical, intellectual and spiritual.  Nothing can be done which would injure or impair any one of these without injury to either one or both of the other two.  To neglect the intellectual and moral nature, and develop only the physical, is only productive of pure brute force, while on the other hand anything which tends to destroy the best development of the physical man undermines and oftimes overthrows both the intellectual and the moral nature.  When a boy gives himself up to self-pollution, or a man yields to the allurements of vice, he not only saps the source of physical power, but the very earliest symptom of his sad mistake and serious sin is found in his perverted moral sense.  His moral nature is the very first to suffer, and with a boy the first symptom of his sin is insubordination to parents, rebellion against God, hostility to the Bible, the Church, and presently to everything that is sacred and good.  The subsequent effect is seen in his weakened intellectual powers, and if he persists in a course of excess and sin, the eventual result may be imbecility, or even insanity.

   Therefore any treatment upon the subject of sexual science which fails to recognize the relation of the intellectual and moral to the highest well-being of the physical nature must be partial, misleading and thoroughly unreliable, and those who fail to bring to boys and men who have been brought under the dominion of self-pollution and sin the assistance which is to be found in the proper quickening of the intellectual and moral natures must fail of any considerable success or permanent good.  Our sexual nature was given to us for the wisest and most beneficent purposes, and both the sexual nature itself and the reproductive function or act as well, when understood and exercised in harmony with the Creator's intent, are sacred and holy; it is only when it is perverted  or when permitted to dominate the higher intellectual and moral natures that the sexual nature becomes a source of evil instead of blessing and good.  God made us to live in our higher moral in intellectual nature.  It was never intended that the lower should rule the higher.  If there is therefore at any time insubordination tint he lower nature, the appeal must be to the higher, to that in us which is kingly and superior and which the Creator intended should be dominant and regnant.

   Our thought upon this subject was beautifully illustrated in a lecture delivered some years ago before an audience composed of theological students by the eminent Doctor Parker, of New York.  In speaking of the body he compared the head to the citadel of a great castle, where its lordly proprietor looks out over his vast domain; the chest, the upper part of the body, he compared to the living-room of the palace, where the important affairs of the household are transacted; the stomach to the kitchen, where that which is to minister to the sustenance and strength of the body is prepared; and the lower offices of the body he compared to that portion of the ho use which is set apart for the laundry and the duties of the scavenger.  It is the man in the citadel, and not the scavengers in the lowest departments of the palace, who is to rule, and yet this latter condition largely results in every human body where a person surrenders his moral intellectual nature to the domination and control of the physical or sexual.

   Our position upon this matter is further illustrated by an incident which took place in the lecture-room at one of the clinics in the medical department of the University of Maryland while the writer was pastor of an adjoining church in the city of Baltimore.  One day an anxious father came with his son to obtain the judgment of one of the professors, who was also one of the most eminent physicians of the city, upon the question of the intellectual capacity of one of his children.  After the examining physician had discovered that the child had the sense of hearing the father was asked two questions:  "Does your child recognize the value of money?" to which the father replied in the negative.  The other question was, "Does your child pray?"  The father replied that the child could not pray, for he did not speak.  To illustrate his meaning the physician said, "When you have your prayers at home, or when in Sunday-school or church, does your child kneel down, clasp his hands, raise his face towards heaven or in any other way place himself in an attitude of prayer?"  The reply was in the negative.  After dismissing the parent with his child, this eminent physician turned to his class of three hundred students and said:  "Young gentlemen, the absence of these two qualities, the one intellectual nad the other moral, are clear indications of idiocy, and the absence of either one makes the sanity of a child a question of grave doubt.  The recognition, in children, of the money-value you may already have observed, but it is equally true that every sane human being born into the world is endowed with a moral nature, and to pray is as natural to a child as the desire for food."  If these statements had been heard from the pulpit they might not have seemed authoritative or impressive, but coming from a learned professor while lecturing to a large class of medical students, the assuredly are both weighty and valuable. 

   In the preparation of these pages, the author has not intended the writing of a series of moral homilies, but were he to ignore the intellectual and moral natures or pass them by without giving them the consideration and prominence which God has assigned to them in the constitution of man, he would be unfit to write to young men upon that which relates to their highest sexual and physical well-being.  Furthermore he would be false to his conviction, steadily strengthened with his investigations of these subjects, that the penalty for violation of the physical nature is also visited upon the moral and intellectual natures.  To ignore them would make the author a traitor to God and to the teachings of His Word.

   Let it, therefore, be clearly understood in the beginning that the physical ruin of no young man can be fully accomplished until the  moral nature  has been dethroned and debased and the intellectual power has been denied its right to reign and rule.  Any man who will enthrone his moral nature and give the sceptre of government to the intellectual powers has done that which will save him from solitary and social sins; or, if his body has been under the dominion of these wicked practices, the intellectual and moral guidance iwll bring about the physical redemption of his body, the recovery of his manhood, and his eventual salvation