He died of no disease known to medical science.  He simply faded away—­weaker, more nerveless and hopeless day by day; he faded away until, almost before any one knew it, the grave yawned to receive him.  Poor, miserable, hopeless wreck—­poor suicide, for his own sin and crime were the real causes of his death.

How many such there are at the present day.  We meet them on the street, in business and at church.  Our insane asylums are full of them.  We find their wives unfaithful or unhappy; and their offspring—­when they are cursed with any—­poor, miserable, weak fledgelings, with aged, wasted faces, water on the brain, with rickets and softening of the bones—­idiots or imbeciles—­dying early and scarcely regretted even by the parent whose progeny they are, for every wail of the little suffering voice pierced his heart and reminded him of his lustful sin, and passionate, inexcusable indulgence that caused all this misery.

  “And the sins of the father shall be visited upon the children,
  even to the third and fourth generations.”

Alas, how true! how indisputable!  The imperative Laws of Nature once broken, the consequences are inevitable.

Of late years it has become the fashion amongst certain men to scoff at this terrible vice of secret indulgence, and to claim that its evil effects are overrated, are portrayed too vividly.  Ask some poor unfortunate whose confidence you may succeed in gaining, and listen to the pitiful tale of lost health and vitality he will tell you.  Mark well the wasted hand, the putty-like skin, the black-ringed, lack-lustre eyes, the heavy lip, the labored breath—­read the consequences of his sin and crime in his shame-faced way, his shambling gait, his nerveless hands, his fluttering heart, his weakened muscles, and his tottering memory and mind.

Must he needs lie dead at our feet before these skeptics can be convinced?  Is not such a state a living death?  Must these men visit him in the cell of the asylum, watch him as a raving maniac, gaze upon him as a hopeless idiot or a driveling imbecile, before they will be convinced?  Such proof is at hand.  Not an asylum in any country but has its score of such; not an asylum record-book but chronicles the sad histories of thousands of these poor, lost creatures—­male and female; not an asylum nurse or doctor but will sadly point out these creatures to you, bereft of every trace of reason, all sense of shame, still practicing the horrible vice that has driven every semblance of humanity from their faces and the very light of reason from their eyes.