Читать книгу A Treatise on the Crime of Onan. Illustrated with a Variety of Cases, Together with the Method of Cure онлайн

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I have not in this, no more than in my first edition, touched upon the moral part, and that for Horace’s reason,

——Quod medicorum est

Promittunt Medici——

I have proposed to myself to write on the diseases produced by self-pollution, and not on the crime of self-pollution, considered as a crime; is it not proof enough of its being one, the demonstrating that it is an act of self-murther? Whoever knows mankind, will not be difficultly persuaded, that it is easier to give them an aversion against a vice, by the fear of a present evil, than by reasons founded on principles, of which there is not care enough taken to inculcate to them all the truth and solidity. I have applied to myself what an author, whose name will pass to the remotest posterity, as an honor to the age in which he lived, makes a Clergyman say: “We are put upon undertaking to prove the utility of prayer, to a man who does not believe there is a God; and the necessity of fasting, to one who has, all his life, denied the immortality of the soul: such an attempt is rather difficult, and the laugh is not on our side[1].” Marphurius doubted of every thing till Sganarelle broke his bones; and then Marphurius believed.