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.

IV. On the other hand, what sad havoc does not the sexual passion play
where it is precociously developed and wantonly indulged. Dr. H.
Fournier, one of the most eminent physicians of Paris, says: "There is
not a vice more fatal to the conservation of man than masturbation."
This unfortunate habit is sometimes acquired by very little boys and
girls. Foolish or vicious nurses may bring it on by handling young
children most indelicately. This is one of the many reasons why none but
virtuous servants and nurses should be employed by wise parents and
physicians. In later years, children often learn this degrading and most
injurious vice from their depraved companions, some of whom seem even to
regard the practice of it as a manly accomplishment. When habitually
indulged in, it produces on the health and the strength of the
constitution effects the most deplorable. Even the intellect is liable
to become thereby enfeebled, a want of virility is exhibited both in the
body and in the mind of its victims; then follows a loss of ambition and
self-control. "When this morbid passion gets control of a person,"
writes an experienced practitioner in medicine, "it is as though an
unclean spirit had entered, subdued the will, weakened the moral forces,
enfeebled the intellectual faculties, lessened the power to resist
temptation, and overc