When I was 13 years old and at a large school I heard for the first time of coitus, but very imperfectly.  For a few days it filled my thoughts and mind, but feeling it was too engrossing a subject and one which took me off better things, I put it out of my mind.  Later, another boy gave me a fuller description of the matter, and I began to have a great desire to know more and to be old enough to practice it.  I also discovered that boys masturbated, and about a year after tried the experiment for myself.  This vice was largely indulged in by my school-fellows.  It never occurred to me that it was sinful, until I was nearly 16, when I came across a passage in Kenns’s Manual of Schoolboys, in which it was hinted such things were wrong morally and spiritually.  Previously I had felt it was an indelicate and shameful thing, and bad for health.  This last idea was held as a solemn fact by all my boy friends.  Gradually religion began to exert an influence over my sexual nature, obtaining as years passed a greater and greater restraining power.  It is simply impossible for me to write a history of my sexual development without also describing the action which Christianity has had in determining its growth.  The two have been so intimately bound together that my life history would not be a faithful record of facts if I left religion out of it.

At school I took part, with great keenness, in cricket and foot-ball, and was very ambitious to excel in everything in which I took an interest, but I always had other tastes as well, which were more precious to me, for example, the love for science, history, and poetry.  Until I was past 16 years my desire was simply for coitus, girls and women attracted me only as affording the means of gratifying this desire; but when I was nearly 17 I began to regard girls as beautiful objects, apart from this, and to desire their love and companionship.  At the same time it dawned upon me that life held much of joy in the love of women and in domestic life—­so henceforth I regarded them in a higher and purer light, and apart from sexual gratification.  In fact, from this period till I was over 20, this idea so dominated my whole being that the lower side of my nature was entirely held in subjection and abeyance by it.  It was rather repulsive to think of girls as objects of lust.  This state of mind was not brought about by any romantic attachment or through any acquaintance or through circumstances.  I was living in great seclusion and had no girl friends.  After this period the lower side of my nature woke up as a giant refreshed with wine, and I underwent for many years a constant struggle with my nature, in which religion always triumphed in the end.  I never fell into fornication, though sometimes into the vice of masturbation.  These outbursts