Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/225

an electric current. Just so is this lymph the union of magnetism, electricity, and nerve-aura,—each rushing from the vital ganglia and fusing in the localities named. When it is present in wedlock's sacred rite then Power reigns and Love strikes deep root in the soul of the child that then may be begotten. If it is absent, the world is sure to receive a selfish, mean, small, contemptible thing in human shape,—a terror, or stalking crime and pestilence,—a partial man or woman, of little use to him or herself, and none at all to others, the world, or God. Wherefore the imperative law the violation of which entails horror, crime, and suffering, through at least a dozen lives—is:Absolute self-mastery in certain respects unless the presence of this divine fluid is God's permit for the holiest of all human enjoyments and duties. It is often present when it ought not to be, and when so, many a man has forgotten his manhood and triumphed over a similarly tempted girl; and many an honest girl and woman has fallen to rise no more. When this fluid is abundantly secreted the only safety is in instant flight, for, unappeased, it begets an insanity and furore too dreadfully intense and imperative to be successfully resisted even by an archangel, much less poor, weak, erring sons and daughters of men. If flight do not take place, and the leakage goes on, Soul itself is wasted, and Madness, with Horror at his gorgon side, waves his cruel baton, and another victim takes his or her place among the awful ranks of the Impotent, Barren, or Insane. It is the loss of this through personal vice solitary, and from the reading of infernal books and plates of damnation, that so many rush into bagnios and the madhouse. Could my readers but visit, as I have done, the magnificent Institution for the Insane at Nashville, Tenn., most ably presided over by Dr. J. H. Callender, a man who knows more about Madness and its cure than all others in the world combined, and witness the soul-harrowing spectacle of splendid people reduced to drivelling, soulless idiocy, wild mania, or absolute dementia from sex perversions, I am sure that no one would allow himself or herself to stand an instant in the presence of a temptation which, if successful, means havoc and destruction to the human soul. May God long preserve Dr. Callender, for the world will need him and such for centuries to come,