be greatly reduced if the young were instructed in the elements of physiology as they bear on this question.  Personally, had I been thus enlightened much sin would have been avoided in my schoolboy days, and a perverted view of sexual matters would never have arisen in my mind.  It took years to overcome the feeling that all such things were unclean and defiling.  Eventually light came to me through reading a passage in a tractate on the Creed by Rufinus.  He was defending the doctrine, of the Incarnation against the pagan objection that it was an unclean and disgusting idea that God should enter the world through the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and he meets it by showing that God created the sexual organs, therefore the objection is invalid—­otherwise God would not be clean or pure, having Himself designed them and their functions.  This passage is slight in itself, but gave birth to a line of thought which has influenced me profoundly.  I no longer regard sexual matters as disgusting and unholy, but as intensely sacred, being the outcome of the Divine Mind.  Further, the Incarnation of the Saviour has not only sanctioned motherhood and all that is implied by it, but has eternally sanctified it as the means chosen for the manifestation of God to the world.  I should not obtrude my theological conceptions, but for the fact that they have determined my life-history in that aspect.

HISTORY IV.—­When I was 9 years old a boy at the preparatory school, which I attended, showed me the act of masturbation, which he said he had practiced for a long time, and which he urged me to imitate, if I wished to become a father when I grew up, and married!  Boy-like I believed him and tried, but the sensation obtained was not a pleasant one (I suppose that I was too rough with myself) and I desisted.

When I was about 12 years old, a schoolfellow told me that he had seen his nurse copulating with the groom, and he and I used to haunt the woods in the hope that we might see an amorous couple so engaged, but without success.  We often talked of the act, as to how it was done.  Neither he nor I had any clear ideas on the subject, save as to the organs involved.  I was about 15 when a maidservant of the house in which I was a boarder, came to my bedroom one night and taught me how to masturbate her.  She said that this was a good thing for me to do, and warned me never to “play with myself” as it would kill me, or drive me mad.  I told her that I had tried it, but could not bring on a pleasurable feeling, so she did it to me, and although I did not have an emission, I derived great pleasure from the act.  She told me that it never did a boy any harm to let a girl play with his parts, and promised that if I would keep the secret, she would often do this for me.  Naturally I promised to say nothing, and she often came up to my room.  Later on she used to insert my penis into her vulva, while she was rubbing it, at the same time giving me