ith
Divine love and power.

"My early habits, after they were broken off, left me none the
less a legacy of sexual neurasthenia and a slight varicocele. My
nocturnal pollutions were overfrequent; and I brooded over them,
being too reticent and too much afraid of exposure at school and
possible expulsion to confide in a doctor. Far better for me had
I done so, for a few years later I received the truest kindness
and sympathy in regard to sexual matters at the hands of more
than one medical man. But while at school I was afraid to speak
of the trouble which so unnerved and depressed me; and as a
consequence my morbid fears grew stronger, being intensified by
generalities which I met with from time to time in my reading on
the subject of the punishment which nature metes out to impurity.

"On leaving school my sex life continued for some years on the
same lines: a struggle for chastity, morbid fears and regrets
about the past, efforts to cope with the neurasthenia, and a
haunting dread of coming insanity. These troubles were increased
by my sedentary life. However I obtained medical aid, and put as
good a face on matters as possible.

"But the most trying thing of all has yet to be mentioned--the
discovery that I had not yet got fully clear of the habit of
masturbation. I had, indeed, repudiated it as far as my conscious
waking moments were concerned, even though strongly impelled by
sexual desire; but one night, about a year after I had
relinquished the practice, I found myself again giving way to it
in those moments between sleeping and waking when the will is
only semiconscious. It was as if a race took place for
wakefulness between my physical instinct, on the one side, and my
moral sense and inhibitory nerves on the other; and very
frequently the physical instinct won. This, perhaps, is not an
uncommon experience, but it distressed me greatly; and I never
felt safe from it until marriage. I resorted to various
expedients to combat this tendency, at length having to tie
myself in a certain position every night with a cord round my
legs, so as to render it impossible to turn over upon my face.

"In my early manhood the strain on my constitution was
considerable from causes other than the sexual neurasthenia,
which, indeed, I am now well aware I exaggerated in import