I believe the stored wisdom of the ages is embodied in that Christian standard, and that the more we know about sex the more clearly do we perceive that that standard points the way, and the only way, to real happiness for men and women in social relations, and to the attainment of our highest life. But I freely acknowledge the right of the rising generation to demand the reasons for this standard. I propose, therefore, to try to state those reasons on the assumption that I am addressing honest and sincere minds who only want to know the truth. I can only work out the answer bit by bit. To begin with, "Why is self-abuse wrong?" It comes under the head of incontinence, which the Bible and all serious moral teachers so firmly condemn. But why? Doctors are beginning to say that unless it is excessive it does no particular harm either to the brain or the body. Its victims worry about it--But need they? Here at least the answer is easily found because it is supplied by those, and by all of those, who indulge in the practice. I have never met a man who did not despise himself for it. It invariably leaves a man out of conceit with himself. I have heard men stoutly defending irregular relations with women, but I have never heard this practice defended, even though it is exceedingly common. Robust male sentiment is all against it. And the reason is that, because it is an attempt to satisfy sexual craving in an abnormal way, it always leaves psychic disturbance behind it. It may relieve a physical tension, but it does nothing to satisfy the whole man. It leaves a bad taste in the mind. Both mind and spirit as well as the body enter into true sexual experience. They have no place in this, and by reason of it the inner harmonies of a man's nature are inevitably jangled. I have noticed, too, a further and very serious consequence of this habit. It plants deep in many men's minds, and especially in the minds of sensitive and intellectual men, an abhorrence for the sexual side of themselves. Just because they have never achieved freedom from them, they hate and despise the passions that overcome them. This often leads to very serious consequences when love enters into their lives. They want then to dissociate love from all its physical concomitants. They regard all things sexual as impure. It may even come to them as a shock to find out that the women they love are capable of passion, and they resent any bodily effects of their own love. And this may almost spell calamity unless psychological adjustment is achieved in time. For true marriage _must_ involve a clean and happy acceptance of the sexual facts. A man must bring a clean mind to the whole of his common life with the woman he loves, and self-abuse is ultimately a serious evil just because it defiles the mind.