A Solemn Appeal - James White

indulgence must necessarily be lustful, and
therefore debasing to their higher feelings. Those
whose intellectuality and morality are feeble, may
spend their surplus vitality on this passion with less
injury, yet cannot cultivate their higher faculties
while they thus revel in lust. Let such remain all
animal and revel on. But for those who have
already too little vitality to sustain their higher
faculties--for such to rob all their nobler, godlike
elements of vitality, just to expend it on a sensual,
debasing passion, is physical, mental, and moral
suicide. Red-faced, bloated, coarse-grained, gouty
subjects--it matters little what becomes of them.
About as well go to Texas and be shot as any way,
or stay and kill themselves, because worth little
anyhow. But for light-built, fine-skinned, finehaired,
spare-built, sharpfeatured, light-eyed
persons, of either sex, to indulge, even in wedlock,
as often as the moon quarters is gradual but
effectual destruction of both soul and body;
because they already work off vitality faster than
their feeble vital apparatus manufactures it. This
excess of expenditure over supply occasions their
sharpness. A surplus would render them fleshy.
246