Therefore when I say, that every young person should be taught before marriage, that the closest conjugal relation should never be allowed, without a willingness on the part of both that pregnancy should follow, I mean simply what I hope I shall make clear throughout my book; that there shall be no pandering to sexual indulgence, while there is unwillingness to bear as many children, as a proper manly and womanly Christian temperance in these things will allow. To fix an absolute rule of practice in these things, and consider it binding upon all, would be going out of my province, and the province of this book. In this, each pair must be judges for themselves: but there needs must be, behind all their thoughts upon this subject, right conceptions upon the holy relation they have entered into. With the above rule fixed, no other limitations, or restrictions need be made. Everything will adjust itself to this rule, and harmony and mutual respect will be engendered. Fix also the fact that the marriage relation is not one of license, but of liberty—liberty for both equally. Not liberty for one, and the grossest bondage for the other. Nowhere does the wife’s opinion deserve greater respect and tolerance than here. Nowhere should her negative be so willingly accepted. There is a higher plane of loving and living than the sexual nature furnishes. This has, we doubt not, been proven to most married people during those weeks and months when continence has been necessary. Then why should this overmaster other and higher considerations? That many marriages are little better than licensed prostitution, seems a hard thing to say; but when the lower nature is petted and indulged at the expense of the higher, it is a just thing to say, however harsh it may seem. In such cases the higher nature becomes more and more dwarfed, the animal nature more and more dominant. Let the husband learn the sweetness of conquest, in the love he bears his wife, in the tender consideration for her comfort and wishes. There is a vast amount of vital force used in the production and expenditure of the seminal fluid. Wasted as the incontinence of so many lives allows it to be, and prostituted to the simple gratification of fleshly desire, it weakens and depraves. Conserved as legitimate control demands it to be, it adds so much, and more to the mental and moral force of the man, because it lifts him to a higher plane of being, and gives to the mental and moral the vital force otherwise wasted.