Besides the historic proof there are daily examples which show the compatibility of chastity with health at any age. Many young men, engaged to be married, remain chaste for long periods without detriment to their health, although often living in continuous sexual excitement. Patients suffering from venereal diseases abstain during long periods of treatment without any impairment of their general health. Men remain chaste and healthy during long periods when their wives are ill or during the periods of confinements. Athletes, training for some physical contest, remain in enforced continence and yet healthy. Seafaring men are often continent for long periods without injury. It is not known that the discoverers of the North Pole have greatly suffered by their enforced continence. These few examples tend to show that abstinence is not detrimental to health. In fact, no other condition of life is more thoroughly consistent with perfect mental and physical vigor than absolute chastity. The instinct only needs to be controlled. Continence is only a matter of habit. When the young man has not been debased by vile practices, it is usually a comparatively easy task to be continent and requires no extraordinary efforts. Every year of voluntary effort, at chastity, renders the task easier by force of habit.[EO] Hence when the young man has been taught the advisability of sensual control, when the positive assurance has been given to him that total abstinence can be maintained without loss of power and when his fears of impairing his health have been dispelled, he will exercise his will-power and refrain from a departure from moral standards, especially when the dearth of wholesome information regarding the dangers of such a departure has been removed. In large cities sensual control is made very hard for the young man. The unfortunate phase of the life in a big city is the early introduction of the youth to temptations and vicious conditions. Vice is obtruding upon him at every nook and corner. A vile so-called literature, a suggestive perverse art and an obscene stage panders his sensual curiosity. But because, forsooth, it is hard to control that does not mean that he has to yield to temptation. It is true that the sexual appetite may assume imperiousness, but only in a certain class of men, in hereditary weaklings, whose imagination is constantly fed by lascivious thoughts and sensual images.