Venery

“ The individual who lives in a filthy neighbourhood, who experiences privations, who indulges to excess in wine or spirituous liquors, who labors hard either corporeally or mentally, who is deprived of sleep, who is affected with sadness, &c., bears the act of venery badly; it adds to the enervation already felt, and generally robs the individuals of health. Venereal pleasures should be abstained from, during the prevalence of epidemics: every person is then disposed to the prevailing disease, and a single act of coition may produce it. ”

“ As the sense of venery precedes, so too it may outlive, the procreative power; it then excites to indulgence at too late a period of life. Examples of this anomaly are very common; hence we need not refer for them to the works of the old writers, we will merely say that a large portion of those committed for attempts at rape are old men. Fortunately the venereal sense is that which suffers the soonest from excesses; and if sometimes the venereal desires are excited, the state of the genital organs prevents their indulgence. ”

“ Antonyms: continence, chastity, virginity. Associated words: venereal, incontinence, incontinent, unchastity, copulatory, gonorrhea, clap, syphilis, cenogamy, infibulation, intromittent, access, nonaccess, orgasm, fecundation, impregnate, impregnation, copulate, lecher, lechery, lecherous, libertine, libertinism, house of assignation, bawd, procurer, bawdry, pander, catamite.
sexual love. venery, amorousness, amativeness. ”

“ We therefore think ourselves justified in saying that 38 other things being equal the period of life when the act of venery is attended with the least trouble, is that which begins when the organization is completed, is perfected ”

“ When he has uttered the lust of the flesh his shudder is followed by an eloquent silence. We can fill up the blank too well—drunkenness, gluttony, thoughts and motions which spring from deliberate, wilfully cherished, rebellious sensuality; which fill many of us with pain and fear, and wring cries and bitter tears from penitents, and even from saints. The second, abuse of free-will, the second element in this world which is not God's world, is the desire of which the eyes are the seat—"the lust of the eyes." ”

“ For, saith the Apostle, 'Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.' Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, love of money, railing, love of pleasure, drunkenness, revelling, arrogance, and such like, of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God. ”

“ It is not true that there has been no time to test it. For thousands of years we have been proving and proving it, over and over. We have tried the experiment of fierceness; and blood answered blood. We have tried the experiment of lust; and lust has left in the mouth the odor of corruption and a fiercer fever. We have forced the body into the most refined and perverse pleasures and found ourselves worn out and heavy-hearted, lying upon filth. ”

“ For every one that is not awake to wisdom, but is steeped in wine, is a sluggard. “And the drunkard,” he says, “shall be clothed in rags, and be ashamed of his drunkenness in the presence of onlookers.” [477] For the wounds of the sinner are the rents of the garment of the flesh, the holes made by lusts, through which the shame of the soul within is seen—namely sin, by reason of which it will not be easy to save the garment, that has been torn away all round, that has rotted away in many lusts, and has been rent asunder from salvation. ”

“ It was as if sin, growing by a secret, stealthy sickness, had flared into an evil, open, raging pestilence, stalking hand in hand with the body’s disease, the one to kill their souls, even as the other defiled their flesh—so incredible were their deeds, so monstrous their cruelty. ”

“ Lust of the flesh.
‘As to the second worldly evil, which is the lust of the flesh—has not this vice, I ask, inundated the Church as with the flood of its lust, so that nothing is more carefully sought after, in these most troublous times, by the most part of priests, than that which ministers to sensual pleasure? They give themselves up to feasting and banqueting; spend themselves in vain babbling, take part in sports and plays, devote themselves to hunting and hawking; are drowned in the delights of this world; patronise those who cater for their pleasure. ”

“ On Lust the love of the pleasures that are contrary to purity.
NO SINS, my children, ruin and destroy a soul so quickly as this shameful sin; it snatches us out of the hands of the good God and hurls us like a stone into an abyss of mire and corruption. Once plunged in this mire, we cannot get out, we make a deeper hole in it every day, we sink lower and lower. Then we lose the faith, we laugh at the truths of religion, we no longer see Heaven, we do not fear Hell. ”

“ He looked carefully at the stages and modes of sin—venial sins, those tiny ulcers that weaken, poison and spoil the soul, even if they do not slay it—lukewarmness, that deathly slumber that engulfs the living thing into gradual death—and, finally, mortal sin, that one and only wholly hideous thing. ”

“ In such a case, we must, as far as lawfully we may, part with that which we cannot keep without being entangled in sin by it. First, It is certain, the inward lust must be mortified, though it be dear to us as an eye, or a hand. The flesh, with its affections and lusts, must be mortified, Gal. v. 24. The body of sin must be destroyed; corrupt inclinations and appetites must be checked and crossed; the beloved lust, that has been rolled under the tongue as a sweet morsel, must be abandoned with abhorrence. ”

“ For hence wild impulses and burning lusts and fiery habits are kindled; and young men inflamed from within become prone to the indulgence of vicious propensities; so that signs of injury appear in their body, the members of lust coming to maturity sooner than they ought. The breasts and organs of generation, inflamed with wine, expand and swell in a shameful way, already exhibiting beforehand the image of fornication; and the body compels the wound of the soul to inflame, and shameless pulsations follow abundance, inciting the man of correct behaviour to transgression ”

“ The old blood remains fresh on the ground, crying for other blood to blot it out. The deed of wrong begets children in its own likeness. The first sin produces an 'Arâ,' a Curse-Spirit, which broods over the scene of the wrong, or over the heart and perhaps the race of the sinner. ”

“ The eyes grow unruly and behold strange women to lust after them, and so let in adultery into the heart. Est Venus in vinis—Wine is oil to the fire of lust. Thy eyes shall behold strange things (so some read it) ; when men are drunk the house turns round with them, and every thing looks strange to them, so that them they cannot trust their own eyes. (2.) The tongue also grows unruly and talks extravagantly; by it the heart utters perverse things, things contrary to reason, religion, and common civility, which they would be ashamed to speak if they were sober. ”

“ What balm would procure a relief to my horrible torture?" He bore in his veins and marrow the desire of all men, of every species, amassed generation after generation, aggravated by the faults of all the fathers and of all the sons, the intoxications of all, the anguishes of all. In his blood blossomed the germs of the secular concupiscence, remingled the most diverse impurities, refermented the venoms, the most subtle and violent, that, since immemorial ages, the purplish sinuous mouths of women had poured out on eager and subjugated males. He was the heir of the eternal evil. ”

“ On the other hand, those evil Spirits, who, by long Custom, have contracted in the Body Habits of Lust and Sensuality, Malice and Revenge, an Aversion to every thing that is good, just or laudable, are naturally seasoned and prepared for Pain and Misery. Their Torments have already taken root in them, they cannot be happy when divested of the Body, unless we may suppose, that Providence will, in a manner, create them anew, and work a Miracle in the Rectification of their Faculties. ”

“ A pox upon your nurse; she frighted me so, when I was young, with stories of the devil, I was almost fourteen ere I could prevail with reasons to unbind my reason, it was so slaved to faith and conscience. She made me believe wine was an evil spirit, and fornication, like the whore of Babylon, a fine face, but a dragon under her petticoats, and that made me have a mind to peep under all I met since.
Wid. Fie, fie! for shame, do not talk so: are you not ashamed to glory in sin, as if variety of women were none?
Jolly. Madam, we do not glory in fornication ”

“ Very soon the wrongdoer shall reap the harvest of a twofold injury: this day another bride shall stand by his side. Is there, then, no way to wreak the just revenge of a broken heart? That suggests sorcery. Yes, the body and soul of the false lover may melt as before a flame; but the price of vengeance is horrible. Yet why? Has not love become devilish? Is not life a curse? ”

“ All the foregoing reasons show the same thing; for, by venial sins indulged, we become more disagreeable to God, our love of Him is diminished, and His to us; we are rendered more unfit for receiving His graces, and they are given more sparingly; our passions become stronger, and we grow weaker; and then what is to be the consequence when the time of temptation comes, but that we fall into mortal sin? (3.) Venial sins lead us on step by step towards mortal sin, and take off by degrees our horror of it. ”

“ Of the innate or acquired causes of venereal excitement, and of the rules of preservation connected with them.—Some individuals seem, as it were, marked by their organization, to become victims of venereal excesses. ”

“ All this is specially true, as the words of the Apostle teach us, of the sins of the flesh, such as drunken-ness and impurity. The body will hang on to sin after the soul has given it up, and will drag the soul again down with it. Oh! that those who are addicted to these horrible sensual habits would realize their danger, and feel the net which the flesh has been weaving round their spirit. ”

“ Every night as she lay awake she pictured what it would be if it were born—this creature conceived in savagery and debauch, this child that she loathed and dreaded. She could imagine it living—a demon, a monster, a thing to shriek at, to make one's blood run cold. ”

“ Others he draweth to insatiable lust and concupiscence, that thereby they fall into the Lues Venerea, and the whole troop of those dire and horrid Symptomes that accompany it, whereby Men and Women undergo great misery, pains, sickness, and sometimes death. Sometimes he pusheth Men on so far in malice, wrath, choler and passion, and many other such like ways, that they wound, lame and sometimes kill one another ”

“ This sinful heart and those impure eyes are but sources of poison which bring death to anyone who looks at or listens to them. How do such monsters of iniquity dare to present themselves before a God Who is so holy and so set against impurity! ”

“ As a virgin shamed By the swelling life unlicensed needles it, But empties not her womb of some last shred Of flesh which fouls the alleys of her body, And fills her wholesome nerves with poisoned sleep, And weakness to the last of life, so I For some shame not unlike, some need of life To rid me of this life I had conceived Did up and choke it too, and thence begot A fever and a fixed debility For killing that begot. Now you see that I Have not grown from a central dream, but grown Despite a wound, and over the wound and used My flesh to heal my flesh. ”

“ Tacitus writes: “To shout, to drink, to caper about, to feel their veins heated and swollen with wine, to hear and see around them the riot of the orgy, this was the first need of the barbarians. The heavy human brute gluts himself with sensations and with noise.” ”

“ They defile the flesh. The flesh or body is the immediate seat, and often the irritating occasion, of many horrid pollutions; yet these, though done in and against the body, do greatly defile and grievously maim and wound the soul. Fleshly lusts do war against the soul, 1 Pet. ii. 11; and in 2 Cor. vii. 1 we read of filthiness of flesh and spirit, each of which, though of different kinds, defiles the whole man.
2. They despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities, are of a disturbed mind and a seditious spirit, forgetting that the powers that be are ordained of God, Rom. ”

“ Conceive, if you please, of a man floating in the most ecstatic delight of heaven pulled suddenly thence down into the most filthy extremity of hell, and then you shall understand the motions of disgust and repugnance and loathing that overpowered our hero, who, awakening thus suddenly out of his dream of love, found himself in the presence of that grim and obscene spectacle of death—who, arousing from such absorbing and exquisite meditations, heard his ears greeted with so rude and vulgar an address. ”

“ I have an infirmity which all the physicians hold to be incurable unless I have pleasure with some woman whom I greatly love. For my part, I would rather die than commit a mortal sin; but, when it comes to that, I know that simple fornication is in no wise to be compared with the sin of homicide. So, if you love my life, you will preserve it for me, as well as your own conscience from cruelty. ”

“ I. As we saw above, mortal sin is always committed whenever venereal pleasure is directly sought or deliberate consent is given to it, even though the venereal excitement be little and stop short of consummated sin. In other words, there is no parvity of matter, as theologians say, in sins of impurity when the venereal pleasure is voluntary in itself. It follows from this that non-consummated .acts of impurity such as immodest touches, looks, talk, reading, will be mortally sinful whenever they are indulged in with a view to exciting venereal pleasure. ”

“ I cannot wonder therefore that you tell us we must hate our flesh and hold our own bodies in horror; and that man, in his present condition, is fated to be accursed, vilified and persecuted.--No, I can no longer feel surprise at this. In truth, there is no form of misfortune and suffering but which he may expect his flesh to bring down upon him. You are right; all the hatred, malediction, and persecution which beset the demon must also beset the flesh and all its motions. ”