e developed for a definite use are kept in
health, and in the enjoyment of fair growth and of long youth, by the
fulfilment of that use, and by their appropriate exercise in the
employment to which they are accustomed." In that statement, which occurs
in the great Hippocratic treatise "On the Joints," we have the classic
expression of the doctrine which in ever varying forms has been taught by
all those who have protested against sexual abstinence. When we come down
to the sixteenth century outbreak of Protestantism we find that Luther's
revolt against Catholicism was in part a protest against the teaching of
sexual abstinence. "He to whom the gift of continence is not given," he
said in his _Table Talk_, "will not become chaste by fasting and vigils.
For my own part I was not excessively tormented [though elsewhere he
speaks of the great fires of lust by which he had been troubled], but all
the same the more I macerated myself the more I burnt." And three hundred
years later, Bebel, the would-be nineteenth century Luther of a different
Protestantism, took the same attitude towards sexual abstinence, while
Hinton the physician and philosopher, living in a land of rigid sexual
conventionalism and prudery, and moved by keen sympathy for the sufferings
he saw around him, would break into passionate sarcasm when confronted by
the doctrine of sexual abstinence. "There are innumerable ills--terrible
destructions, madness even, the ruin of lives--for which the embrace of
man and woman would be a remedy. No one thinks of questioning it.
Terrible evils and a remedy in a delight and joy! And man has chosen so to
muddle his life that he must say: 'There, that would be a remedy, but I
cannot use it. I _must be virtuous!_'"

If we confine ourselves to modern times and to fairly precise
medical statements, we find in Schurig's _Spermatologia_ (1720,
pp. 274 et seq.), not only a discussion of the advantages of
moderate sexual intercourse in a number of disorders, as
witnessed by famous authorities, but also a list of
results--including anorexia, insanity, impotence, epilepsy, even
death--which were believed to have been due to sexual abstinence.
This extreme view of the possible evils of sexual abstinence
seems to have been part of the Renaissance traditions of medicine
stiffened by a certain opposition between religion and science.
It was still rigorously stated by Lallemand early in the