Admonition

As I am about to write on this slippery matter, I am pleased to quote this grave admonition of St. Alphonsus: "Now with difficulty we undertake to treat that matter, the very name of which infects the minds of men. Let the chaste reader pardon me, I ask, if he finds here several questions and circumstances omitted by Father Busembaum, but discussed and explained. Would that I had been able to explain more briefly or more obscurely! But since this is the more frequent and more abundant matter of confessions, and that on account of which the greater number of souls slide down into hell; indeed, I do not hesitate to assert that because of this one vice of impurity, or at least not without it, all who are damned are damned; therefore it was necessary for me, for the instruction of those who desire to learn moral science, to explain myself clearly - though as chastely as could be done - and to discuss very many particulars.

"Yet I beg students who are preparing themselves for the office of hearing confessions that they not read this treatise on the sixth precept, nor likewise the other on the conjugal debt, except... for this one end alone, casting away every curiosity whatsoever. And at that time let them often lift their mind to God and commend themselves to the Immaculate Virgin, lest, while they are striving to gain the souls of others for God, they themselves suffer harm to their own souls" (III, 413).

¹ Cf. Cajetan, Commentarium on the cited place of St. Thomas; Billuart, De temperantia, dissertations 4-6; De matrimonio, dissertation; Waffelaert, De virtutibus cardinalibus; Noldin, De VI praecepto et de usu matrimonii; Eschbach, Disputationes physiologico-theologicae; Alberti, De Sexto et Nono praecepto et Usu matrimonii; Vermeersch, De castitate et de vitiis contrariis; Duynstee, De leer der kuischheid; Merkelbach, Quaestiones de castitate et luxuria; Antonelli, Medicina pastoralis; Capellmann-Bergmann, Pastoralmedizin; Von Olfers, Pastoralmedizin; Surbled, La Morale dans ses rapports avec la medecine et l'hygiene.