“On the psychic side my sexual emotions awoke in early childhood; and though my love affairs as a boy were not frequent and were kept to myself, they attained a considerable degree of emotional power.  Leaving out of account the precocious movements of the sexual instinct to which I have already referred as colored by psychic algolagnia, I may say that somewhat later, from the age of puberty and onward, I had three or four love affairs, devoid of any algolagnic tendency, and considerably more developed on the psychic and emotional, than on the physical, side.  In fact, my experience has been that when deeply in love, when the mind is full of the love ecstasy, the physical element of sexuality is kept—­doubtless only temporarily—­in abeyance.

    “To return now to the subject of masturbation.  Here befell the
    chief moral struggle of my early life; and no terms that I have
    at command will adequately describe the stress of it.

“A casual remark heard one day as I was arriving at puberty convinced me that there must be truth in the vague schoolboy theory that masturbation was weakening.  It was to the effect that the evil results of masturbation practiced in boyhood would manifest themselves in later life.  I then realized that I must relinquish masturbation, and I set myself to fight it; but with grave misgivings that, owing to the early age at which I had formed the habit, I had already done myself serious harm.

“Before many weeks had passed, I had formed a resolution to abstain, which I kept thereafter without—­so far as I remember—­more than one conscious lapse into my former habit.  Here it must be said at once that, so far as touches my own experience of a struggle of this kind, the religious factor is of primary importance as strengthening and sustaining the moral effort which has to be made.  I am writing an account of my sexual, not my spiritual, experiences; but I should not only be untrue to my convictions, but unable to give an accurate and penetrating survey of the development of my sex life, unless I were clearly to state that it was to a large extent on that life that my strongest and most valuable religious experiences arose.[219] It is to the endeavor to discipline the sexual instinct, and to grapple with the difficulties and anxieties of the sex life, that I owe what I possess of spiritual religion, of the consciousness that my life has been brought into contact with Divine love and power.

“My early habits, after they were broken off, left me none the less a legacy of sexual neurasthenia and a slight varicocele.  My nocturnal pollutions were overfrequent; and I brooded over them, being too reticent and too much afraid of exposure at school and possible expulsion to confide in a doctor.  Far better for me had I done so, for a few years later I received the truest kindness and sympathy in regard to sexual matters