Part 2

There is one more bit of advice, in these days, which we might give to young men. The War seems to make it somehow wrong, that a young man, of decent character, in good health and steady work, should remain unmarried. He ought to marry, that sons of his may serve their country, filling the empty places of the young men who have died for their country. Before the War, it was nobody’s business but his own, whether a young man were married or single. We observe him now from another point of view, with every added month of the War, and every casualty-list; we say that he is not doing his duty, if he prefers the comfort and the freedom of bachelor-life to the cares of marriage and parentage. Let him so live now, in these terrible days, that his children shall be born healthy, a blessing alike to him and to his country.

Now, to finish with, let me dot the _i_’s and cross the _t_’s of this paper. It is likely enough that I have been talking more of things as they were in my boyhood than of things as they are now. The Victorian Age was in many ways magnificent; but it neither approved of inquisitive children, nor enlightened them. For example――one of my contemporaries tells me that she was taught botany out of a book called _Lindley’s Ladies’ Botany_. In this book, the fact that flowers are male and female was carefully left out. She learned this fact when she was 18; she gathered it from a sermon in church, and it vexed and offended her. We have got past all that sort of nonsense. But we are still at sixes and sevens how to tell children about their bodily nature. We let them alone, they let us alone; we wait, they wait; neither we nor they like to begin. We do not know what they are thinking of. But we know this much, that there are two sets of thoughts which must, simply must, be growing up together in their minds――the idea of sex, and the idea of God. We cannot help them without self-preparation; we muddle them, not educate them, on these two subjects, unless we have made up our own minds how we will answer their questions.

Further, I do believe that some parents might well make a solemn little home-ceremony of telling a child about his or her bodily nature; not leave it to chance, nor to the unclean talk of schoolfellows; no, nor even leave it to the child’s teachers. Father or mother ought to do it. And, when the children are grown up, it ought to be done again, with clear warning against the dangers which they are going into.

Finally, what they need is not physiology alone, but physiology and faith together. There has been a great deal too much science talked about adolescence. Too much physiology, pathology, psychology――not that psychology really is a science――too much analysis, too many statistics. If any of you, as parents or as teachers, do require a short science-book, there is Dr. Starr’s _The Adolescent Period_. It has its faults. It is unduly apprehensive of some things which are not important. It makes too much of those boys and girls who are abnormal. Some children are abnormal; and some, but very few, are as it were demoniac, to their own misery and the misery of others. These most unhappy children have been put under the microscope for us by our kind friends the psychologists. But the vast majority of boys and girls are normal.

Dr. Starr’s book is not for general reading. Still, for the right sort of readers, it is a good and useful book. But what, after all, do we want with books? It is the children that we have got to read; not books about them, but them. I doubt whether psychologists understand ordinary children better than a wise old family nurse understands them. Boys and girls are human beings: they were not discovered by science: they refuse to be elucidated by science. The way for us to help them is not by psychology, but by faith, self-preparation, courage, and common sense.

_Printed in England by_ Butler and Tanner, _Frome and London_

Transcriber’s Notes:

――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.