When we turn the light of this new conception on to our old ideas of
purity,--to the virtue or the vice, accordingly as we may have been
pleased to consider it, of sexual abstinence,--we begin to see that those
ideas need radical revision. They appear in a new light, their whole
meaning is changed. No doubt it may be said they never had the validity
they appeared to possess, even when we judge them by the crudest
criterion, that of practice. Thus, while it is the rule for physicians to
proclaim the advantages of sexual continence, there is no good reason to
believe that they have themselves practised it in any eminent degree. A
few years ago an inquiry among thirty-five distinguished physicians,
chiefly German and Russian, showed that they were nearly all of opinion
that continence is harmless, if not beneficial. But Meirowsky found by
inquiry of eighty-six physicians, of much the same nationalities, that
only one had himself been sexually abstinent before marriage. There seem
to be no similar statistics for the English-speaking countries, where
there exists a greater modesty--though not perhaps notably less need for
it--in the making of such confessions. But if we turn to the allied
profession which is strongly on the side of sexual abstinence, we find
that among theological students, as has been shown in the United States,
while prostitution may be infrequent, no temptation is so frequent or so
potent, and in most cases so irresistible, as that to solitary sexual
indulgence. Such is the actual attitude towards the two least ideal forms
of sexual practice--as distinguished from mere theory--on the part of the
two professions which most definitely pronounce in favour of continence.

It is necessary, however, as will now be clearer, to set our net more
widely. We must take into consideration every form and degree of sexual
manifestation, normal and abnormal, gross and ethereal. When we do this,
even cautiously and without going far afield, sexual abstinence is found