“What!” he exclaimed; “I must then believe that you are not a perfect man, or that you intend to work out your own damnation; unless you should tell me that you are a Christian only outwardly.”

“I am a man in the very strongest sense of the word, and I am a true Christian.  I must even confess that I adore women, and that I have not the slightest idea of depriving myself of the most delightful of all pleasures.”

“According to your religion, damnation awaits you.”

“I feel certain of the contrary, because, when we confess our sins, our priests are compelled to give us absolution.”

“I know it, but you must agree with me that it is absurd to suppose that God will forgive a crime which you would, perhaps, not commit, if you did not think that, after confession, a priest, a man like you, will give you absolution.  God forgives only the repenting sinner.”

“No doubt of it, and confession supposes repentance; without it, absolution has no effect.”

“Is onanism a crime amongst you?”

“Yes, even greater than lustful and illegitimate copulation.”

“I was aware of it, and it has always caused me great surprise, for the legislator who enacts a law, the execution of which is impossible, is a fool.  A man in good health, if he cannot have a woman, must necessarily have recourse to onanism, whenever imperious nature demands it, and the man who, from fear of polluting his soul, would abstain from it, would only draw upon himself a mortal disease.”

“We believe exactly the reverse; we think that young people destroy their constitutions, and shorten their lives through self-abuse.  In several communities they are closely watched, and are as much as possible deprived of every opportunity of indulging in that crime.”

“Those who watch them are ignorant fools, and those who pay the watchers for such a service are even more stupid, because prohibition must excite the wish to break through such a tyrannical law, to set at nought an interdiction so contrary to nature.”

“Yet it seems to me that self-abuse in excess must be injurious to health, for it must weaken and enervate.”

“Certainly, because excess in everything is prejudicial and pernicious; but all such excess is the result of our severe prohibition.  If girls are not interfered with in the matter of self-abuse, I do not see why boys should be.”

“Because girls are very far from running the same risk; they do not lose a great deal in the action of self-abuse, and what they lose does not come from the same source whence flows the germinal liquid in men.”

“I do not know, but we have some physicians who say that chlorosis in girls is the result of that pleasure indulged in to excess.”

After many such conversations, in which he seemed to consider me as endowed with reason and talent, even when I was not of his opinion, Yusuf Ali surprised me greatly one day by the following proposition: