ONAN ESCHEWED - Rick Grunder

104 TEASLEY, D[aniel]. O[tis]. PRIVATE LECTURES TO MEN AND BOYS.
Including Early Training and Sexual Physiology, Secret Sins and Sexual Disorders,
Helps to Purity, Illicit Intercourse and its Attendant Ills, and Love, Courtship and
Marriage. By D. O. Teasley. Author of "Private Lectures to Mothers and Daughters,"
"The Holy Spirit and Other Spirits," etc. "Keep thyself pure." "Flee also youthful lusts:
but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a
pure heart." Moundsville, W. Va.: The Gospel Trumpet Co., 1905 [c. 1905 by
D. O. Teasley].
17 cm. 144 pp. Orig. tan cloth, front board gilt-lettered and decorated in blue
and green. Moderate soil and light wear to binding; internally very good. $85
Only edition on OCLC, which locates four copies: Library of Congress,
Anderson University (Indiana), Azusa Pacific University (California) and Warner
Pacific Collection (Oregon). One copy appears for sale on the Internet (October
24, 2010) in more worn condition than the one offered here for $83.50 (and many
print-on-demand copies as high as $98).
MASTURBATION, pp. 39-73, with more interspersed throughout the next chapter,
pp. 74-90. The text is very Sunday-School in feel, and rather wordy. It does
include some excellent general advice in regard to exercise and not smoking. But
it also falls into standard traps of its time, predictably following standard myths,
and presenting them in occasional quotable passages, such as the following
edifying excerpts:
Boys, if you have not been guilty of masturbation or of adultery, for Jesus' sake
and for your own sake, "Keep thyself pure." [p. 79]
Never lie in bed after you awake in the morning; arise at once, and busy yourself
all day. "An idle brain is the devil's workshop." . . . Better sleep on a hard bed,
with only enough cover to keep you from chilling. [p. 85]
Many schools, especially [p. 46 ends] boarding-schools, are veritable hotbeds of
masturbation and sexual defilement; and woe to the boy who is sent there
ignorant of this awful sin. About as well send him to a lion's den or to the hole of
an asp. . . . One bad boy is enough to poison a whole school, and blight a
thousand lives. [pp. 46-47]
. . . it is hard to find a boy who is a cigarette-smoker who is not a masturbator.
One writer has said, "There is not one boy in five hundred, who chews or smokes
tobacco at age fifteen, but what is a masturbator." [p. 56]
Insanity.—While insanity does not always result from masturbation, it is well
known that many persons are driven to insanity by this practise. The insane
asylum at Utica, N.Y., it is said, has five hundred cases that were brought there
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