It's effects are liable to be transmitted to the third and fourth generation of one's posterity; one's wife is liable to be inoculated; it is an important factor in filling asylums for the insane; it causes paralysis, heart disease, aneurisms, diseases of the eye, brain, kidneys, liver, bones, and other almost innumerable affections. It often horribly disfigures the countenance with permanent scars; or, by corrosion of the nasal bones, the nose may fall in, and then the victim is labelled with his disease in the most prominent part of his anatomy.
It undermines the health and increases the liability to take diseases of all kinds consumption, pneumonia, heart disease, etc. At the very best the victim must undergo an active, expensive and irksome course of treatment. The syphilitic must remain under the observation of his physician for a lifetime; and he need expect no assurance that the disease may not again manifest itself at some period in his life; nor must he be offended at the anxiety of the physician for the welfare of his wife and children, even under the most favorable circumstances which prevail in himself.
Chancroids are local lesions, with no lasting effects on the constitution, but they leave permanent disfiguring scars about and on the genitals.
Leprosy is not common in these climes, though not unknown. It has been supposed to be largely a venereal disease, and baffles treatment.
The man who makes the gratification of the lustful appetite the chief end of his life, giving himself up to the pursuit of it without restraint, uncontrolled by the law of self preservation, and deaf to reason or morality, and even the man who partially goes in for such a course of life, exposes himself to the ravages of these loathsome diseases, being led on to cultivate a taste which perhaps is perverse by inheritance, but which is more often unduly stimulated by the influences of evil associations, by a vicious misinformation, or by the erotic pastimes of society.
Whether he is ignorant or not makes not the slightest difference as to the consequences of his disease, and in any event he has become "sin's fool", with jaded or over stimulated desires, perverted tastes, and diseased tissues a stranded wreck, penitent perhaps, but unfit to become an ancestor. Fools beckon on fools, the moralist and hygienist are laughed at, and dunces are always ready to follow what is represented to their willing ears as the "manly" path of lust.
Excuses for enjoying the delights of love are ready to hand, or responsibility can be stifled and conscience repressed by stupefying the senses with alcohol; and then, as when the "governor" of a steam engine is disordered, the mechanism of the brain's functions is confused, and the unreasoning man rushes on to take the chances of uncertainty.
These reckless men, while unreformed, are harmful citizens wherever they may be. "No fornicator hath inheritance in the kingdom of Jesus Christ" (Ephes. v. 5), and we do not need them here.
Seneca said, "Impurity is the foremost of the world's wickednesses"; Cicero said, "There is no more heinous pest than the indulgence of uncleanliness"; and St. Isidore said, "Whatever sin you name, you shall find nothing equal f to this crime." The voice of Nature condemns it by the obvious consequences, and womankind and posterity would say, could they speak out, " Oh, have mercy on us!"
To many a diseased man whose reproductive power has expired prematurely, or whose generative functions are disordered, the light of life seems to have gone out. The
premature extinction of virility causes such deep mental depression and such despondency that the wretched man sees everything as though it were in black, and is, in fact, in mourning, though compelled by policy to wear the "counterfeit mask of dissimulation." Very often such a victim is led to commit suicide, or becomes hypochondriacal or insane.