cloisters were lost in complete darkness.

The minister had explained the seventh commandment. He had spoken of
immorality between married and unmarried people. He could not explain
to his pupils what immorality between husband and wife meant, although
he was a married man himself; but on the subject of immorality in all
its other aspects he was well-informed. He went on to the subject of
self-abuse. As he pronounced the word a rustling sound passed through
the rows of young men; they stared at him, with white cheeks and
hollow eyes, as if a phantom had appeared in their midst. As long as
he kept to the tortures of hell fire, they remained fairly indifferent,
but when he took up a book and read to them accounts of youths who had
died at the age of twenty-five of consumption of the spine, they
collapsed in their seats, and felt as if the floor were giving way
beneath them! He told them the story of a young boy who was committed
to an asylum at the age of twelve, and died at the age of fourteen,
having found peace in the faith of his Redeemer. They saw before their
shrinking eyes a hundred corpses, washed and shrouded. "There is but one
remedy against this evil," went on the minister, "the precious wounds of
Christ." But how this remedy was to be used against sexual precocity, he
did not tell them. He admonished them not to go to dances, to shun
theatres and gaming-houses, and above all things, to avoid women; that
is to say to act in exact contradiction to their inclinations. That this
vice contradicts and utterly confounds he pronouncement of the community
that a man is not mature until he is twenty-one, was passed over in
silence. Whether it could be prevented by early marriages (supposing a
means of providing food for all instead of banquets for a few could be
found) remained an open question. The final issue was that one should
throw oneself into the arms of Christ, that is to say, go to church, and
leave the care of temporal things to the upper classes.