III. No possible evil to any individual man or woman can result from the firm control that one may acquire over the passion of lust. On the contrary, if it should be controlled all through life, this would only add to a man's strength of mind, firmness of will, soundness of body, and length of life. For in the school of morality, in which every Physician should be educated, the leading principle is: "Contraries are cured by contraries," "_Contraria contrariis curantur_." On this principle, lust is most efficiently controlled by aiming, at least in youth, at total abstinence from its indulgence. You know that, in the Catholic Church, priests and religious lead a single life, and pledge themselves for life to practise the most perfect control of the sexual passion. What do you think is the result of their total abstinence on this point with regard to their length of days? As a rule their life is much longer, in normal circumstances, than that of the other learned professions. Here are a few proofs. In France, during the twenty years from 1823 to 1843, 750 priests died in the diocese of Paris. Of these only 200 were under sixty years old; there were 554 between sixty and seventy years old, 448 over seventy, and 177 over eighty. Again, of 202 Carmelite nuns who died in a large convent of Paris, Dr. Descuret, the attending physician, states that 82 had lived over seventy years, 23 over eighty years. Most Trappists and Carthusians die of scarcely any other sickness than old age. All young people who aspire to the clerical or religious profession learn from their early years the holiness and the loveliness of purity. Our Church effects this result by placing before their youthful imaginations the most perfect of patterns of virtue, the infant Saviour, the virgin Mother, the boy saints Aloysius and Stanislaus, the maidens Agatha and Cecilia, and a whole phalanx of Christian heroes and heroines. I dwell the more willingly on this subject, gentlemen, because, besides protecting modesty in your young patients generally, it may fall to the lot of some of you, in the course of your professional careers, to be attending physicians to religious houses; and you will then appreciate the delicacy of the flowers of virtue that bloom beneath the shadow of the sanctuary. Certainly even there you may happen to find isolated cases of infidelity to duty; for human nature is not angelic nature; but in such abodes it comes near to it, at least for the vast majority.