CHAPTER VI

BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL LIFE

I now come to what must always be the great moral crux in a boy's life, that on which all the higher issues of his character will, in all human probability, turn--his school life. One of our great educators took what, looked at superficially, seemed the somewhat retrograde step of giving up the mastership of a college at Oxford to take again the head-mastership of a great public school. But in a conversation I had with him he led me to infer that he had done so from the conviction forced upon him that the whole moral trend of the character must be given, if given at all, prior to university life, at the public school; and to him nothing less than the formation of high moral character seemed worth striving for. Fine scholarship and high mathematics are excellent, but after all, as the apostle of culture, Matthew Arnold, has told us, conduct, and not intellectual attainment, forms seven-tenths of life.

Now, it is in connection with your boy's school life that you will have your greatest dangers to face, your hardest battle to fight.

I am, of course, aware that your school system is in some respects different from ours. You have the mixed day school such as largely obtains in Scotland, but which does not exist, at least for the upper classes, in England. You have private boarding-schools, which with us are called preparatory schools, as they form the vestibule to the public school. And you have, lastly, a few large public schools somewhat on the model of Eton and Harrow.

Let us begin with the boarding-school. I do not intend for one moment to deny the advantages of our great English public schools. They are excellent for discipline and the formation of strong character, especially for a ruling race like ours; and their very numerical strength and importance command a splendid set of men as masters. But both public and private boarding-schools labor under one great disadvantage: they remove a boy from all family influence and violate the order of our life, which can never be violated with impunity. Boys and girls are sent into the world in pretty equal proportions, and we were never intended to pile a lot of boys together without girls and largely without any feminine influence whatever. To do so is to insure moral disorder whether in our schools or yours. To quote from an excellent paper of Dr. Butler's: "In giving us sisters," says one of the Hares in _Guesses at Truth_, "God gave us the best moral antiseptic," and it is their absence more than anything else that has produced the moral problems which our boarding-schools present. To be absent from sisters for the greater part of the year, at an age when their companionship is perhaps the most eloquent of silent appeals to purity, is undoubtedly one of the greatest evils to be set against the blessings of our public schools.[11]

For my own part, I can only say that the one thing which has filled me at times with the darkness of despair has not been the facts about our back streets, not those facts to meet which we hold conferences and establish penitentiaries, refuges, preventive homes, etc.--I am full of hopefulness about them--but the facts about our public, and still more about our private, schools, which until lately have been met with dead silence and masterly inactivity on the part of English parents. On the part of mothers I feel sure it is ignorance, not indifference: if they knew what I know, it simply could not be the latter. Even now, when some, at least, of their ignorance has been dispelled, I doubt whether they realize the depth of moral corruption which is to be found in our public and private schools; the existence of heathen vices which by the law of our land are treated as felony, and which we would fain hope, after nineteen centuries of Christianity, might now be relegated to the first chapter of Romans. They do not realize the presence of other and commoner forms of impurity, the self-defilement which taints the moral nature and stimulates the lower nature into unhealthy and abnormal activity. They do not understand the essentially sporadic nature of the evil--that it may exist "as a pestilence that walketh in darkness" in one boarding-school, while another, owing to the influence of a good set of boys, is comparatively free from it; and they will, therefore, take a single denial of its existence, possibly from their own husbands, as conclusive. Even the affirmations of head-masters are not altogether to be trusted here, as mothers cannot betray the confidence of their own boys, and often fail in gaining their consent to let the head-master know what is going on, in the boy's natural dread of being found out as the source of the information and, according to the ruling code, cut, as having "peached." Once I obtained leave to expose an indescribable state of things which was going on in broad daylight in an unsupervised room at one of our great public schools, utterly unsuspected by the head-master, and his subordinate, the house-master. But another case which for long made my life a kind of waking nightmare remained unexposed to the last.

Speaking of those commoner forms of impurity to which I have referred, and which are so mischievous as stimulating immature functions, needing, as Acton over and over again insists, absolute quiet and rest for healthy development, Dr. Dukes, the head physician of one of our best known public schools, states: "The reason why it is so widespread an evil"--computed in 1886 at eighty per cent. of boys at school, a computation accepted by a committee of public schoolmasters--"I believe to be, that the boy leaves home in the first instance without one word of warning from his parents that he will meet with bad boys who will tell him that everybody does it, and thus he falls into evil ways from his innocence and ignorance alone."[12]

Dr. Dukes further states that as the results of his thirty years' experience he had come to the conclusion that only one per cent. of parents ever warned their boys at all before sending them to school.

These statements were made some fifteen years ago, when first the conspiracy of silence was broken through and the question of the morality of our public and private schools was dragged into the light of day and boldly faced and grappled with, largely owing to the action of Dr. Pusey. Since then a mass of strenuous effort has been directed against the evil by our high-minded head-masters; and an immense improvement has been effected. It is too short a time for one to hope that the evil has been eradicated; but when parents learn to fulfil their moral duties of teaching and warning their own boys--as Dr. Dukes observes--I feel sure it could be so far removed as to cause the numbers to change places, so that we might obtain a percentage of ninety to ninety-five of those who lead pure lives while at school, as against five per cent, who are impure, reversing the lamentable ratio that now exists. But here again there has been progress, and I feel sure that the percentage of parents who do warn and teach their sons before sending them to school is now incomparably higher than Dr. Dukes's "one per cent." and is steadily rising.

As to other deeper and nameless evils, they have been already reduced to a minimum, and if fathers could only be persuaded to do their duty by their own boys, they might be made wholly to disappear.

I give you these facts about our English schools, that parents may see for themselves what are the consequences of refusing both teaching and warning to their boys, under the delusion that God's lilies will grow up in the weedy garden of the human heart without strenuous culture and training.

Do not, therefore, I beseech you, take for granted that your boarding-schools are entirely free from such evils. You have the same conditions that we have. Till lately your boys have been as untaught and unwarned as ours. In your boarding-schools, as in ours, they are removed from the purifying influence of mother and sisters. They are just at the age which has neither the delicacy of childhood nor of early manhood. Rest assured that conditions will breed like results.

"My belief, not lightly formed," says Dr. Butler,[13] "is, that none of the great schools can congratulate themselves on anything like safety from this danger. And if this is true of the great public schools, it is still more true of private schools, where the evil is admittedly greater. Boys and masters alike may strangely deceive themselves; the evil may hide very close. Many a boy has been known to assert positively and honestly that nothing of the kind was ever heard of in his time, and that any fellow suspected of it would have been cut, and half killed, when all the time the evil was actively at work even among the circle of his intimate friends."

And yet it is this evil, so pervasive in its influence, so certain to taint the fresh springs of young life with impure knowledge, if not to foul them with unclean acts, that parents still too often elect to ignore. The boy, full of eager curiosity, anxious, above all things, to catch up the ways of the other fellows, afraid, above all things, of being laughed at for his innocence, and elated at being taken up by one of the swells in the shape of an elder boy, and at first set-off wholly ignorant of the motive; exposed to suggestions about the functions of his own body which he has not the knowledge to rebut as the devil's lies--what wonder is it that so many boys, originally good and pure, fall victims? "They blunder like blind puppies into sin," a medical man who has had much to do with boys' schools exclaimed to me in the bitterness of his soul. The small house of the young boy's soul, full of the song of birds, the fresh babble of the voices of sisters, all the innocent sights and sounds of an English or American home, swept and garnished till now by such loving hands, but left empty, unguarded, and unwatched, for the unclean spirit to lift the latch and enter in and take possession--the pity of it! oh, the pity of it! What can the boy think? To quote Dr. Dukes again:

"He will say to himself: 'My father knows of all this vice at schools, and yet has not said one word to me about it. He has warned me about most things. He told me to be truthful, to keep my temper, to be upright and manly, to say my prayers; he pressed me never to get into debt, never to drink, and never to use bad language; and he told me I ought to change my boots and clothes when wet, so as not to get ill; and yet he has not said one syllable about this. My father is a good man and loves me, and if he wanted me not to do this he would surely have told me; it can't be very wrong, else I am sure he would have protected me and told me all about it."

I remember a friend of mine, who had been greatly stirred on the whole subject, endeavoring, with tears in her eyes, to persuade a father to warn his boy before sending him to his first public school, and on his absolutely refusing to do any such thing, she said to him, "At least promise me that you will give him this book," placing in his hands Mr. George Everett's excellent little book, _Your Innings_. This he consented to do. The next morning my friend met him at breakfast, the boy having been already despatched by an early train. "Well," he said, "I sat up till past twelve last night reading your book; it is excellent, and I gave it to my lad before starting him off. But there is just one chapter in it, called a 'Strange Companion,' which I took the precaution of previously cutting out with my penknife; and my boy in his after years will thank me for not putting any such ideas in his head, but having kept him the pure and innocent lad that he is." I need not say that it was the one chapter that would have put the boy on his guard. Oh, befooled and purblind father! I happened to know that the school to which the boy was sent was swept at that time by a moral epidemic, and before that hapless lad had been a week in its corrupt atmosphere he would have had ideas put into his head with a vengeance. His father had handed over the ground of his boy's heart for the devil to sow the first crop, and as a rule the devil sows, not wild oats, as we say, but acorns--a dread sowing which it may take years to root up and to extirpate, even if, so far as after-taint is concerned, it can ever be wholly extirpated.

In another case a widowed mother came to one of my meetings, and was profoundly alarmed at what I said about the dangers of our schoolboys. It had never occurred to her that her gentlemanly little lad of twelve could have any temptations of the kind. Unlike the father I have mentioned, she resolved to speak to him that same evening. She found that he was fighting a battle against the whole school, standing up alone for the right, guided by some blind instinct of purity to resist the foul suggestions which were inflicted upon him, threatening him with the most terrible consequences in after-life if he did not yield and do as the other boys did. Think of it, ye mothers! a child of twelve without a hand to guide him, without a voice to cheer him, refused the knowledge that would have saved him from his deadly peril, his own mother deaf and dumb and blind to his struggles, leaving him to fight his little forlorn hope absolutely alone. I need scarcely say how thankfully he poured forth his sore heart to his mother when once she had opened the door, till now kept locked by her own ignorance; and how she was able to explain to him that, far from reaping any evil consequences from doing what is right, like Sir Galahad, "his strength would be the strength of ten" if he kept himself pure. She probably took steps to remove him from so corrupt an atmosphere as prevailed in that preparatory school, but of this I do not know.

But here let me guard myself from being misunderstood. I am not making out that every schoolboy is exposed to these temptations; there are boys so exceptionally endowed that they seem to spread a pure atmosphere around them which is respected by even the coarsest and loosest boys in the school. All I do maintain, with Dr. Butler, is that no school is safe from this danger, that at any time it may prove an active one in your boy's life, and that at the very least you have to guard him from impure knowledge being thrust upon him before nature has developed the instincts of manhood by which she guards her inner shrine.

And now I come to the question of day schools. As I have already said, I cannot feel but they are more consonant with the order of our life as giving the discipline and competition of numbers without removing the boy from family life, nor do they lend themselves to some of the graver evils of our boarding-schools. But, alas! in themselves they form no panacea for the evils we are contemplating. On the contrary, I am told on authority I cannot question that in some places this plague spot is rife among them. In one case the evil had struck so wide and deep that the school had to be temporarily closed. Here, again, the same lesson is emphasized, viz.: that whatever is the form of the school, however excellent the teacher, there is no substitute in the moral life for the home teaching and training of mothers and fathers.

No mother can read these statements unmoved--statements, remember, not my own, but made by men of the deepest and widest experience, and which, therefore, you are bound to weigh, ponder, and carefully consider. I know that straight from your heart again comes the cry, "What can I do?"

I am inclined to answer this cry in one word, "Everything,"--with God's help.

I

And now let us enter into practical details. We will begin with the outworks, and work our way inwards to the shrine.

First, as to the all-important choice of a school, should the boy's father decide, for reasons in which you concur to send him to a boarding-school.

As to how to ascertain the real state of a school there is, of course, considerable difficulty. I have always found the best way is through mothers who have gained the confidence of their boys and who know through them what really goes on. In this way, as mothers wake up to the danger their boys run and to their own responsibility in guarding them, we shall be able to help one another more and more. But make a point of yourself, as well as the boy's father, personally seeing the master to whom you think of entrusting your lad, and talking over the matter with him. In this way you will not only satisfy yourself, but you will strengthen his hands by making him feel how vital the whole question is to your heart. What more than anything else weakens the high-minded men who have the tuition of the young is the utter unconcern that is evinced by the parents and the sense that, by the payment of a sum of money down, they can compound with a master for the performance of their inalienable duty of undertaking the moral education of their own children.

Here let me give you two most earnest cautions. Do not attach too much importance to mere mechanical arrangements as moral safeguards. One of our most successful head-masters says:

"I would most seriously warn any parent anxious about the choice of a school not to attach much weight to the apparent excellence of arrangements. Some of the worst schools have these arrangements in the highest perfection. They cannot afford to have them otherwise. Neat cubicles and spotless dimity have beguiled an uninterrupted sequence of mammas, and have kept alive, and even flourishing, schools which are in a thoroughly bad moral state and are hopelessly inefficient in every particular. Of course, many a parent feels that he ought to judge for himself, and these mechanical arrangements are too often the only material on which he can form his judgment. Let me assure him that they are entirely untrustworthy."

Secondly, do not think to find safety in the choice of a so-called "religious" school, even though it reflect the exact shade of your own religious opinions. The worst evils I ever knew went on in a school where the boys implicated held a weekly prayer-meeting! We must boldly face the fact that there is some mysterious connection between the religious emotions and the lower animal nature; and the religious forcing-house, of whatever school of theology, will always be liable to prove a hot-bed of impurity. Choose a school with a high moral tone, with religion as an underlying principle--a practical religion, that inculcates duty rather than fosters emotion, and embodies the wise proverb of Solomon, "In all labor there is profit, but the talk of the lips tendeth to penury."

Only let me beseech you to use your whole influence not to have your boy sent away at too early an age. Do you really think that the exclusive society of little boys, with their childish chatter, their foolish little codes, their crude and often ridiculously false notions of life, and their small curiosities, naturally inquisitive, but not always clean in the researches they inspire, and _always_ false in their results, is morally better for your child than, in Dr. Butler's words,

"the refining and purifying atmosphere of home, with the tenderness of a mother, the grace and playfulness of sisters, the love and loyalty of the family nurse, and lastly--scarcely to be distinguished in its effects from these influences--the sweetness, the simplicity, the flower-picking, the pony-patting of happy, frolicsome younger brothers or sisters in the garden, the paddock, or stable?"

If the boy has got out of hand, I ask, Whose fault is that? and is it fair to the child that your fault should be remedied by sending him away from all that is best and most purifying in child life? I would plead earnestly that eleven or twelve is old enough for the private school, and that a boy should not be sent to a public school before fourteen. In this I think most of our English head-masters would agree with me. Till this age, a day school or a tutor should be had recourse to, and when the time comes for sending him off to school, at least we can refuse to place the boy anywhere, either at a private or public school, where there is not some woman to mother and look after the boys and exert a good womanly influence over them. A head-master keenly alive to moral dangers, with a capable wife ready to use her womanly influence in aiding and abetting his efforts, I have found the best possible combination.

But if it is decided that the boys are to be brought up at the day school, your range of choice will probably be very small. You will have to look wholly to your home influence and teaching to counteract any evil influence they may encounter in their school life. But as your boys will never be separated from you, what may not that home influence and teaching, with knowledge and forewarning to direct it,--what may it not accomplish?

II

Let us, then, think out the best ways in which you can warn and guard your boy and fulfil your responsibility of being his moral teacher.

Let us begin with the simplest measure which you can take, and which can present no difficulty to anyone. Before sending your boy to school get him quietly by himself and say to him some such words as these: "My boy, you know, or will come to know, that when boys get together they often talk of nasty things, and even do nasty things. Give me your word of honor as a Christian and a gentleman that you will never say or do anything that you know you would be ashamed to tell me, that you know would bring a blush to your sister's cheeks. Always remember that dirty talk, and still more dirty deeds, are only fit for cads. Promise me faithfully that you will never let any boy, especially an elder boy, tell you 'secrets.' If you were to consent through curiosity, or because you feel flattered at one of the elder fellows taking you up, be sure he means you no good. Whatever you want to know ask me, and so far as I can I will tell you." Some such words as these said solemnly to a boy the day before he leaves home for the first time, either for a boarding-school, or even a day school, will make your womanhood a sort of external conscience to your boy, to guard him from those first beginnings of impurity, in the shape of what are technically called "secrets," which lead on to all the rest. I know one mother who, from her boy's earliest years, has made a solemn pact with him, on the one hand, if he would promise never to ask any questions about life and birth of anyone but her, she, in her turn, would promise to tell him all he wanted to know; and from first to last there has been that perfect confidence and friendship between mother and son which is, and ever must be, a boy's greatest safeguard.

Only remember that with young boys men who have had the greatest experience are generally agreed that it is better not to put the stress on religious motives. Practically, for a young boy, it is better to treat the whole thing as dirty, nasty, and blackguardly. And the whole subject must always be spoken of with reserve, without any emotion, and with much "dry light."

With most lads I should go a step further; I should give the boy one of the White Cross papers, "A Strange Companion."[14] It is impossible to lay down hard and fast rules; it is impossible to make so many jam-pots of even young humanity, to be tied up and labelled and arranged upon the same shelf. Each individuality has to be dealt with in all its mysterious idiosyncrasy. One boy may be so reserved that it is better to write to him than to talk face to face; another may find the greatest possible strength and comfort in freedom of speech and the feeling that there is no barrier between him and his mother with regard to being able to tell her freely of any temptations that may assail him. Your mother's instincts will be your best guide as to what method to adopt with each of your boys.

If the father of the lad can be induced, at any rate before he enters a boarding-school, to follow the advice of that remarkable man, Mr. Thring, the founder of Uppingham School, in his address to our Church Congress, and write a letter of plain warning and counsel to the lad, it would be an unspeakable help. "My first statement," says Mr. Thring, "is that all fathers ought to write such a letter to their sons. It is not difficult, if done in a common-sense way."[15]

But now I come to what on all hands we must allow to be a point of extreme difficulty. I think all head-masters, deeply concerned in the moral welfare of the boys under their charge, would emphatically endorse the following words of Dr. Butler's:

"It is certain, it must needs be, that boys should, at an early period of their boyhood, come to hear of the nature of sexual relations. From whom should they first learn it? Should it be with every accompaniment of coarseness, of levity, of obscenity? From some ribald groom in the stables? From some impure maidservant who has stolen into the household and the nursery? From some brother only a year or two older, who has just received his first initiation in impurity at a private school and is too young to understand its danger? Worst of all, from the idlest, and most corrupt, and most worthless set of boys at this same private school, who surround the newcomer within a few days, perhaps a few hours, of his first joining, and, with knowing looks and enticing words, try to probe his childish knowledge, and leave him half-ashamed of himself and keenly inquisitive for full initiation, if he finds that he knows nothing of this engrossing mystery? Is it right, is it fair, is it consistent with religious duty or with common-sense, that a little boy of eight, or ten, or twelve, should be sent at this impressionable age to hear for the first time of facts of human nature which must ere long be known, and are part of God's appointment? Does not every dictate of humanity and of reason point to the conclusion that the dawn of this knowledge should be invested with all that is tender, and loving, and pure, and sacred, instead of being shrouded in the mists of innuendo or blazoned forth in the shamelessness of bestiality? There is really no answer but one to such a question, and the plain truth is that fathers, perhaps still more mothers, must recognize the duty which lies upon them to teach their children, at such times, in such words, and with such reservations as the character of each child may suggest, the elements at least of that knowledge which will otherwise be learnt but a very little later from a widely different set of instructors. I lay down the principle as admitting of no exception--I do not anticipate even one dissentient voice from any who now hear me--_that no boy ought ever to be allowed to go to school without learning from his father or his mother, or from some brother or tried friend considerably older than himself the simple facts as to the laws of birth and the terrible danger of ever coming to talk of these phenomena as matters of frivolous and filthy conversation_."

I can only beseech you to give due weight to these words of one who had many years' experience of a large public school. Over and over again, at all my meetings of educated mothers, I have reiterated his question in similar words, "Is it right, is it fair, that your boy should learn the sacred mysteries of life and birth from the sources which Dr. Butler enumerates, and to which you abandon him, if you refuse to speak; sources of unclean and lying information by which I have no hesitation in saying that the mind and conscience of many men are more or less permanently defiled, even when the life has been kept outwardly pure?" Can you hesitate for one moment to allow that the springs of the life which you will be the first to acknowledge comes from God should well up from a pure source, till, like Wordsworth's stream--

"Crowned with flowers, The mountain infant to the sun laughs forth,"

and that the whole subject should be so bound up in the boy's mind with his father's love for his mother, his mother's love for his father, with his own existence, and that of his sisters, that he would shrink with utter loathing from the filthy so-called "secrets" that are bandied about among schoolboys? I know that the task of conveying this knowledge presents many difficulties, but again I ask, "What is there in our life that is worth doing which is not difficult?" Long ago the definition of a difficulty to me has become "a thing to be overcome." It is not in sitting down helplessly before a difficulty that the way will open. With us, as with the Israelites on the brink of that raging midnight sea, it is in a brave obedience to the Divine command, "Go forward!" that the path opens through the trackless sea, and we find that the great waters that seem ready to overwhelm us are in reality a baptism into new life.

III

Again I seem almost to hear the cry of your heart, "I know I ought to speak to my boy, but how am I to do it?"

Now, it is here that I earnestly desire to give you, if I possibly can, some helpful, practical suggestions, for I feel that it is not in the recognition of a duty, but in its performance, that the difficulty lies which is arresting so many educated mothers at the present time.

With very young children, whether girls or boys, there should be no difficulty whatever. They are too young to understand. Only, when they come to you asking their innocent little questions as to where the little baby brother or sister comes from, I would earnestly ask you never to allow yourself, or your nurse, to inflict on them the usual popular fables, that the baby was brought by the doctor or that it was found under the gooseberry-bush. A child is far quicker than we think to detect that mother is hiding something, and the first tiny seed of evil curiosity is sown. Make no mystery about it; look your child full in the face, and say, "My child, you have asked me a question about what is very, very sacred. If I were to try to explain it to you, you would not be old enough to understand; for the present you must be content to know that the baby comes from God; how it comes mother will tell you when you grow old enough to understand; only promise me that you will never ask any one but mother about it." The child will then see that you are hiding nothing, and will be satisfied to wait for the explanation that mother has promised.

But what when the child is old enough to understand?--an age which doubtless varies in different children, but which with boys must come before their first school, if you are to occupy the ground of his heart with good seed, which leaves no room for the devil's sowing.

Well, with regard to the facts of birth, I do not think we ought to find much difficulty. You can point out how the baby seed has a soft, downy place provided for it in the pod of the parent plant till it has ripened and is fit to be sown, when the pod opens and lets it fall to the earth, and it becomes a plant in its turn. You can point out that the egg in a similar way is carried in the mother bird's body till the shell has hardened and is fit to be laid, when she warms it with her own breast, patiently sitting on it for days, while the father bird feeds her, till the little chick is strong enough to break the walls of its tiny house, and come forth and peck and fend for itself. You can explain how the little kitten the child plays with has in the same way a safe place provided for it in the mother's body, where it grows and grows till all its organs are formed, and it can breathe and suck, when, like the seed from the pod, and the chick from the egg it leaves the mother's body, and is born, a blind and helpless baby kitten, to be fed and tenderly cared for by the mother cat. You will explain that the baby comes in just the same way so far as its infant body is concerned, growing like the kitten from a tiny cell--borne by the mother till all the organs are formed which it needs for its earthly life, when it also is born and laid in its mother's arms, to be nourished and cared for by the love of both father and mother, not for a few weeks, as with animals, but through long years of helplessness. And you mean to tell me that the sacred truth would not endear you to your child far more than the usual cock-and-bull story about the doctor and the gooseberry-bush?

A friend of mine has three boys of widely opposite character and temperament. Owing to circumstances, the eldest lad had to be sent to school at an early age. Young as he was, she resolved to follow Dr. Butler's advice and tell him the facts of birth in the way I have suggested. On realizing the truth, the boy flung his arms round her neck and burst into tears. But though she felt that she had done right, she was not wholly without misgivings that she might have introduced some objectionable talk into her nursery. When the time came to send the second lad to school, she repeated the talk that she had had with his elder brother. But to her surprise she found him in total ignorance of the facts: his elder brother had never confided them to him. And so again with the third boy. Evidently the boys had considered it too sacred a thing to talk about--how much too sacred, then, to allow of their joining in with the unclean gossip of schoolboys! Its only result was to give them an added tenderness for their mother, and to make them resent all such unclean talk as so much mud flung at her.

So far, so good. But we all of us realize that it is not the facts of birth, but the facts of the origination of life, that form the perennial source of obscene talk, and often of obscene action, among boys; and it is in explaining these, without violating those instincts of reserve and modesty with which nature herself surrounds the whole subject, that what often seems an insuperable difficulty arises. Yet these functions are, and must be, the very shrine of a body which is a temple of the Lord and Giver of life; and on the face of things, therefore, there must be some method of conveying pure knowledge to the opening mind with regard to them. The difficulty must be with ourselves, and not in the very nature of things themselves.

Has it not been created in a great measure by a wrong method? We begin with human life instead of ending with it; we isolate it from a great system to which it belongs, and treat what is "the roof and crown of things" as a roof that tops no fair edifice, and is therefore anomalous; as a crown that rests on a head which has been severed from its body, and is therefore unmeaning. We obstinately refuse to live--to quote Goethe's words again--not only "in the beautiful and the good," but also "in the whole," which is equally necessary for a well-ordered life. What it seems to me we need is to teach the facts of life-giving, or, in other words, of sex, as a great, wide, open-air law, running right through animated creation, an ever-ascending progression forming a golden ladder leading up to man.

In explaining the facts of reproduction, I would therefore suggest that you should begin with the lowest rung of the ladder, the simplest organisms, such as the amoeba or the volvox. I should show how these multiply by fission, the creature dividing into two, when it is impossible to tell which is the father and which is the mother. I would then pass upwards to more complex organisms, where two individuals are required to form the offspring. You could explain the whole process by the method of fertilization in plants, as urged in an excellent paper by a lady doctor, published in the _Parents' Review_.[16] Let me quote her words:

"The child can learn the difference of the names, color, and forms of flowers as soon as it can learn anything. The next step would be to simple lessons in the different parts of a plant--the vegetative organs of roots, stem, leaves, passing on to the reproductive organs in the flower--calyx, corolla, stamen, and pistil. Let the child be taught to notice that all flowers have not quite the same organs, some bearing stamens only, which shed the powdery pollen and are the male, or little father flowers; while others have the pistil only, furnished with the stigma to catch the pollen, and are the females, or little mothers; that the one sort of flowers is necessary to the other in producing the little seed or baby plant."

Let us take a primrose. Here the mother and father elements are found in the same flower. At the base of the flower, packed in a delicate casket, which is called the ovary, lie a number of small white objects no larger than butterfly-eggs. These are the eggs or ova of the primrose. Into this casket, by a secret opening, filmy tubes thrown out by the pollen grains--now enticed from their hiding-place on the stamens and clustered on the stigma--enter and pour a fertilizing fluid, called "spermatozoa," through a microscopic gateway, which opens in the wall of the egg and leads to its inmost heart. The ovule, or future seed, is now fertilized and capable of producing a future primrose. Covered with many protecting coats, it becomes a perfect seed. The original casket swells, hardens, is transformed into a rounded capsule or seed-vessel, opening by valves or a deftly constructed hinge. One day this seed-vessel, crowded with seeds, breaks open and completes the cycle of reproduction by dispersing them over the ground, where they sow themselves, and grow and become primrose plants in their turn, starring the grass with their lovely blossoms.[17]

Sometimes the male and female elements grow upon different plants, as in the catkins children are so fond of gathering in the spring.

"More than two thousand years ago Herodotus observed a remarkable custom in Egypt. At a certain season of the year the Egyptians went into the desert, cut off branches from the wild palms, and bringing them back to their gardens, waved them over the flowers of the date-palm. Why they performed this ceremony they did not know; but they knew that if they neglected it the date-crop would be poor or wholly lost. But the true reason is now explained. Palm-trees, like human beings, are male and female. The garden plants, the date bearers, were females, the desert plants were males; and the waving of the branches over the females meant the transference of the pollen dust from the one to the other."[18]

From these two elements, the spermatozoa, or male element, and the ova, or female element, all life, except in the lowest organisms, is produced.

You could point out how it is by this marvellous process of reproduction, not only that the world is made green and beautiful, but all animal life is fed. Corn and rice, which are only fertilized seeds, form the staple food of a large proportion of mankind; while even the animal in order to live has first to be nourished on corn or grass before it can become meat for man.

You could go on further to illustrate the facts of reproduction by bees and ants, so familiar to children, where the drone or male bee, or the male ant, in just the same way as in the plant, fertilizes the eggs of the queen bee or ant by bringing the spermatozoa into contact with the unfertilized egg in the insect's body, when the eggs thus fertilized are laid and carefully nurtured by the working bee or ant. All children have observed the little neuter,[19] or working ant, carrying in its mandibles an egg almost as large as itself with an air of extreme hurry and absorption, to lay it in the sun till the warmth hatches it into a baby ant.

If it were further pointed out that not the male, but the female, as the mother of the species, is Nature's chief care; that among ants the male is sent into the world so imperfectly endowed that he cannot even feed himself, but is fed by his female relations, and that as soon as he has performed his function of fertilizing the queen ant, Nature apparently dismisses him with contemptuous starvation; or--to take the case of the drone or male bee--he is stung to death by the workers, it might help to modify the preposterous pretensions of the male, especially of the boy, in higher circles.

You could then pass upwards through fish with the soft and hard roe, or male and female elements which are familiar to children, and through frogs with their spawn to birds. Here comes in an upward step indeed. "A world that only cared for eggs becomes," as Professor Drummond observes in his _Ascent of Man,_ "a world that cares for its young." The first faint trembling dawn, or at least shadowing forth, of a moral life, in the care of the strong for the weak, makes itself seen, which henceforth becomes as pervasive an element in Nature as the fierce struggle for existence in which the weak are destroyed by the strong.[20]

In the bird--till now "the free queen of the air," living at her own wild will, suddenly fettered and brooding on her nest, and covering her helpless young with her tender wings--we see some faint image of the Divine tenderness. In the ceaseless toil of both the parent birds from morning till night to fill the little gaping throats we begin to feel the duty of the strong to serve and protect the weak; and in the little hen partridge, still clinging to her nest, when the flash of the scythe is drawing nearer and nearer, till reapers have told me they have feared the next sweep of the scythe might cut off her head, we see more than a shadow of that mother's love which is stronger than death. And when we pass lastly to the highest order of animals, the mammalia, we find them named after the mother's function of giving suck to her young from her own breast. They are no longer matured in an external egg, but are borne in her own body till they are able to breathe, and seek their nourishment from her, and then they are born so helpless that, as with kittens and puppies, they often cannot even see.

In this higher order of animals nothing can exceed the devotion of the mother to her young in their helpless infancy. The fierce bear will recklessly expose her shaggy breast to the hunter in their defence. Here, too, we find, as the Duke of Argyle points out in his book on _The Unity of Nature_,

"that the equality of the sexes, as regards all the enjoyments as well as the work of life, is the universal rule; and among those of them in which the social instincts have been especially implanted, and whose systems of polity are like the most civilized polities of men, the females of the race are treated with a strange mixture of love, loyalty, and devotion."

"Man" as the Duke says, "is the Great Exception," and has been defined as the only animal that ill-treats and degrades his female.

And when at length we come to the topmost step, "the roof and crown of things,"--Man, as you have already explained the physical facts of life-giving on the plane of plants, and ants, and bees, where they can excite no feeling of any kind, you will have no need to go over them again, but will find yourself free to express the physical in terms of the moral. Man, as a spiritual being, incarnate in an animal body, takes this great law of sex which we have seen running through the animated creation, and lifts it into the moral and the spiritual. The physical love which in animals only lasts for the brief time that is needed for the production and rearing of offspring--becomes in him a love which "inhabiteth eternity," and unites him to the mother of his children in the indissoluble union of marriage. His fatherhood becomes the very representative of the Father in heaven. The mother becomes the very type and image of the Love that has loved us with more than a mother's love, borne with us with more than a mother's patience, suffered for us, in the Cross and Passion, more than a mother's pangs, to bring us into a higher life. The love of brothers and sisters becomes the first faint beginning of the universal Church and the brotherhood of man; and the sweet babble of their voices grows choral at length in the songs of the Church triumphant, the unbroken family in heaven; while the Christian home shadows forth the eternal home which awaits us hereafter.[21]

The only warning you would have to give your boy would be to point out that, as a cathedral takes longer to build than a shanty, so the human body, which is meant to be the temple of the "Lord and Giver of life," takes much longer to mature than an animal's. Many an animal lives and dies of old age in the fourteen years that leave man still an immature boy. And you must earnestly impress upon him that the whole of this part of his nature which you have been explaining to him as a great law running through animated creation and finding its highest uses in Man, must be left to mature itself in absolute rest and quiet. All premature use of it is fatal to perfect health of soul and body. The less he thinks of it, and the more he thinks of his work and his athletics, the better for him. Above all, you hope, now that he knows the truth and his curiosity is satisfied, he will loathe all filthy jests and stories about that which is the source of all beautiful living things on the pleasant earth and, in his own little world, of all happy family life and innocent home love and joy.

Let me quote here, in conclusion, a little poem, called "The Golden Ladder," which seems to me to embody some of the teaching of this exquisite page of the illuminated Word of Creation, which man has so blotted and defiled with his obscenities, but which to "open hearts and love-lit eyes" is the spring of all that is highest--the birth of the moral and the cradle of the divine.

"When torn with Passion's insecure delights, By Love's dear torments, ceaseless changes worn, As my swift sphere full twenty days and nights Did make, ere one slow morn and eve were born;

"I passed within the dim, sweet world of flowers, Where only harmless lights, not hearts, are broken, And weep out the sweet-watered summer showers-- World of white joys, cool dews, and peace unspoken;

"I started, even there among the flowers, To find the tokens mute of what I fled-- Passions, and forces, and resistless powers, That have uptorn the world and stirred the dead.

"In secret bowers of amethyst and rose, Close wrapped in fragrant golden curtains laid, Where silver lattices to morn unclose, The fairy lover clasps his flower-maid.

"Ye blessed children of the jocund day! What mean these mysteries of love and birth? Caught up like solemn words by babes at play, Who know not what they babble in their mirth.

"Or of one stuff has some Hand made us all, Baptized us all in one great sequent plan, Where deep to ever vaster deep may call, And all their large expression find in Man?

"Flowers climb to birds, and birds and beasts to Man, And Man to God, by some strong instinct driven; And so the golden ladder upward ran, Its foot among the flowers, its top in heaven.

"All lives Man lives; of matter first then tends To plants, an animal next unconscious, dim, A man, a spirit last, the cycle ends,-- Thus all creation weds with God in him.

"And if he fall, a world in him doth fall, All things decline to lower uses; while The golden chain that bound the each to all Falls broken in the dust, a linkless pile.

"And Love's fair sacraments and mystic rite In Nature, which their consummation find, In wedded hearts, and union infinite With the Divine, of married mind with mind,

Foul symbols of an idol temple grow, And sun-white Love is blackened into lust, And man's impure doth into flower-cups flow, And the fair Kosmos mourneth in the dust.

O Thou, out-topping all we know or think, Far off yet nigh, out-reaching all we see, Hold Thou my hand, that so the top-most link Of the great chain may hold, from us to Thee;

"And from my heaven-touched life may downward flow Prophetic promise of a grace to be; And flower, and bird, and beast, may upward grow, And find their highest linked to God in me."

Possibly you will say at once, "Oh, my boy has no taste for natural history, and he would take no interest in this kind of thing." All the better his finding it a bit dry--it will rid the subject of some of its dangerous attraction. I have yet to find the boy for whom the Latin Grammar has the least interest; but we do not excuse him on that ground from grinding at it. Whether he takes an interest in it or not, you have to teach him that he has got to know about these things before going to school, to guard him from the danger of having all sorts of false, and often foul, notions palmed off on him. I do not say that pure knowledge will necessarily save, but I do say that the pitcher which is full of clear spring-water has no room for foul. I do say that you have gained a great step, if in answer to the offer of enlightenment which he is certain to receive, you have enabled your boy to acquit himself of the rough objurgation--forgive me for putting it in schoolboy language: "Oh, hold your jaw! I know all about that, and I don't want any of your rot." I do say that early associations are most terribly strong, and if you will secure that those early associations with regard to life and birth shall be bound up with all the sanctities of life--with home, with his mother, with family, with all that is best and highest in life; then his whole attitude in life will be different. But if these early associations are linked with all that is false and foul, some subtle odor of the sewer will still cling about the heart of the shrine, a nameless sense of something impure in the whole subject; an undefinable something in his way of looking at it, which has often made the purity of men--blameless in their outer life--- sadden and perplex me almost as much as the actions and words of confessedly impure men.

IV

But, whatever is the importance I attach to pure teaching, I return to my old position, that purity is an attitude of soul, or, perhaps I ought to say, the "snowy bloom" of the soul's perfect health, rather than anything you can embody in moral maxims or pure knowledge--that perfect bloom of spiritual health which may be as much the result of a mother's watchful care and training as the physical health of the body. It is for you to train your boy in that knightly attitude of soul, that reverence for womanhood, which is to men as "fountains of sweet water" in the bitter sea of life; that chivalrous respect for the weak and the unprotected which, next to faith in God, will be the best guard to all the finer issues of his character. Truth of truth are the golden words of Ruskin to young men:

"Whomsoever else you deceive, whomsoever else you injure, whomsoever else you leave unaided, you must not deceive, nor injure, nor leave unaided according to your power any woman whatever, of whatever rank. Believe me, every virtue of the highest phase of manly character begins and ends in this, in truth and modesty before the face of all maidens, in truth and reverence or truth and pity to all womanhood."

Can we doubt or question this, we who worship Him who came to reveal the true man quite as much as to reveal the only true God--the real manhood beneath the false, perishable man with which it is so often overlaid by the influence of society and the world? Look at His attitude towards women, ay, even Eastern women, who had not been ennobled by centuries of Christian freedom and recognized equality of the sexes, but who, on the contrary, belonged to a nation tainted to some degree with that Eastern contempt for women which made a Hindu answer the question of the Englishman, perplexed by the multiplied of Indian gods and sects, "Is there _no_ point of belief in which you all unite?" "Oh, yes," the Pundit replied, "we all believe in the sanctity of cows and the depravity of women!"

These Eastern women, therefore, had much to enslave and lower them; but see how instantly they rose to the touch of the true Man, just as they will rise, the women of to-day, to the touch of the true manhood of your sons, if you will train them to be to us such men as Jesus Christ was. See how He made women His friends, and deigned to accept their ministry to His human needs. Many severe rebukes are recorded from His lips to men, but not one to a woman. It was a woman, ay, even a degraded woman, who by her kisses and her tears smote the Rock of Ages and the water of life flowed forth for the world, who won for the world the words: "He who hath been forgiven much loveth much," and the burden of guilt is changed into the burden of Love. It was to a woman He first gave the revelation of life, that He first revealed Himself as the Water of Life, and first uttered the words, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." It was women who remained faithful when all forsook Him and fled. It was a woman who was the last to whom He spoke on the cross, to a woman that the first words were spoken of His risen life. It was a woman He made His first messenger of the risen life to the world. Nothing in the life of the true Man on earth stands out in more marked features than, if I may venture to use the words, His faith in women, as if to stamp it forever as an attribute of all true manhood, that without which a man cannot be a man.

Now, side by side with this attitude of the true Man, this perfect loyalty to all womanhood as such, ay, even degraded womanhood, place the present debased attitude of men, even of some Christian men, which we are looking to you mothers of boys to change _in toto_. Is not a powerful writer in the _Westminster Review_ right when he says, "There is not found a chivalrous respect for womanhood as such. That a woman has fallen is not the trumpet call to every noble and wise-hearted man to raise her up again as speedily as may be; rather it is the signal to deepen her degradation and to doom her to moral death." Is it not a received code even among Americans as well as Englishmen that if a woman knows how to respect and protect herself men are to respect her--it is only a scoundrel that will dare to say an insulting word to her? But if she is a bit fast and giddy, if she has little or no respect for herself, if her foolish feet have slipped ever so little, then she is fair game. "She gave him encouragement; what else could she expect? It was her own fault." To expect that any man with an ounce of true manhood in him would at once say, "That young girl does not in the least realize the danger she is in, and I must get between her and the edge of the precipice, and see that she comes to no harm."--this would be to expect the wildly impossible. Have we not made up our mind that the beast and not the Christ is our master here; and does not every beast spring at once on a fallen prey? It is human nature, and you will never get men to think and act any differently. As to faith in man as such, not only in the church-going man, but in the rough-spoken fisherman, the contemned publican, the infidel Samaritan, faith in his power of recognizing and rising to the truth, the higher standard placed before him, _that_ I sometimes think lies buried in that Eastern garden--in the Sepulchre "wherein never man yet lay."[22] And yet it is the man as revealed in Jesus Christ, not the man as fashioned by the world, with its low traditions and low public opinion, that is true to human nature. In moments of excitement or danger he reverts to this true nature, which has been so warped and overlaid by the world. In the great mass meetings which I held for the purpose of pleading with men to come over on my side and help me in the work of saving women from the awful doom to which men sentence them, I used to bring this home by saying to them: "If a fire were to break out in this vast hall, who would be the first person that you would try to save? It would be me because I am a woman"; and the roar of assent that burst forth from all parts of the building showed that I had struck home. I used to bring before them--and the sooner you bring it before your boys the better--the conduct of the men on the ill-fated _Birkenhead_--ah! dear men, voiceless and nameless, and lost in that "vast and wandering grave" into which they sank, what have they not done to raise the tone of England? You will possibly remember that the _Birkenhead_, with a troop of our soldiers on board, struck and foundered not far from land. The women and children were at once crowded into the boats, and it was only when, in a few minutes, the ship began to settle that the cry was heard among the men, "To the boats! to the boats! every man for himself!" But the officer in command stood up and shouted, "What! and swamp the women and children? Die rather!" And those men did die. Drawn up in military array, without moving a muscle, those men sank into the bitter waters of death, that the women and children might live.[23] That I contend is man's true nature, to love the woman, and, if needs be, to give himself for her.

It is, therefore, to recognize and strengthen this true nature of man, to get it deeper into him, and not to get it out of him, as I cannot but feel we have hitherto more or less done, to train your boys in this perfect loyalty to all womanhood as such; and to send forth men into the world to "die rather" than save themselves at the cost of a woman, to "die rather" than drive a woman down into those deep waters of degradation and death, that we look to the mothers of the future as the sole hope of the world. I say again you have got to see that they learn in relation to their own sisters what they have to practise towards all women, however humble, ay, and however degraded, in their future life. As the great English oaks are built up of tiny cells, so this true manliness must be built up by a mother's watchful use of a thousand small daily incidents--by what Wordsworth rightly calls the best part of a good man's life--

"His little daily, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love."

In themselves they seem almost too trivial to mention:--the easy chair instinctively given up on the sister's entrance; the door opened for any woman passing out; the cap removed in the presence of ladies, even though those ladies are his own relatives; the deck-chair taken out by the seaside to make the mother comfortable; the favorite cricket-match given up if an expedition has been fixed in which his services are needed; the window raised and the door shut on leaving a railway-carriage in which women are travelling, so as not to expose them to draught; and, when men-servants are not kept, the sister's bicycle cleaned or the skates polished--all those "little daily, unremembered acts" of knightly service which the mere presence of a woman ought to inspire in a man.

I am well aware that here again, as Mr. Philip Hamerton points out, the boarding-school presents a difficulty. As he says, "The worst of the distant school system is that it deprives the home residence that remains of all beneficial discipline; for the boys are guests during the holidays, and the great business is to amuse them."[24]

But surely this needs only to be mentioned to be remedied. You do not make your boys happier during their holidays by making them selfish: what is really a novelty to a schoolboy, fresh from the association with boys only, is to have sisters to look after and a mother to depend upon him for all sorts of little services. A joyous exclamation on your part, "Oh, what a comfort it is to have a boy in the house to do things for one!" will make him swell with manly pride; and should he show the least tendency to put upon his sisters and make them fetch and carry for him, as they are only too willing to do, you can easily put a stop to that by a few caustic remarks that you don't want savages in your house; and a pointed use of that delightful story in one of the White Cross papers,[25] of the Zulu chief to whom the Government sent a propitiatory present of wagons and wheelbarrows, thinking that it would be sure to please him. But he gazed on them with fine scorn, exclaiming: "What's the use of those things for carrying our burdens when we have plenty of women!" Or you can use that equally good story, told by Sir John Lubbock at a sectional meeting of the British Association for the Promotion of Science, of a remote tribe of savages who had never seen a bullock, and when the white man arrived with his bullock wagons, after much perplexed discussion, they came to the conclusion that, as they were used for heavy loads, they must be the white man's wives!

A little wholesome, if incisive, raillery on your part will quickly extinguish any tendency to make willing slaves of his sisters. If, however, you prefer to indulge your foolish fondness for him, that subtle self-indulgence which makes it easier for you to sacrifice yourself and his sisters to him rather than discipline him to work out his true nature, remember you gratify yourself at his most cruel cost. You produce the boy whose youth is marked by a tacit contempt for girls and whose manhood will be disfigured by a light estimation of the beauty and sanctity of womanhood.

I know well I shall be told that all this is quite out of date; that modern girls are so independent that they stand in no need of brothers, but like to place themselves on a level with them and share as good comrades in all their rough-and-tumble games. Let us be of good cheer. Sex is a very ancient institution, the slow evolution of hundreds of centuries, and is in no danger of being obliterated by the fashion of a day. Take the most advanced "new woman"; yes, concealed under that virile shirt-front, unchoked by that manly necktie and turned-up collar, lurking beneath that masculine billy-cock; nay, hidden somewhere deeper down than the pockets of even those male knickerbockers, you will find the involuntary pleasurable thrill at a strong man's chivalrous attention, the delicious sense of a man's care and protection, which centuries and centuries of physical weakness have woven into the very tissues of her being, in however loud and strident a voice she may deny it. Whatever changes in the position of women may take place, the basic fact remains, and will always remain, the man is stronger than the woman, and his strength is given him to serve the weaker; and you have got to get your girls to be your fellow-helpers in developing all that is best and most chivalrous in their brothers, and not so to run riot in their independence as to substitute a boyish camaraderie for the exquisite relations of the true man to the true woman.

There rises up now before me a boy, one of those delightful English boys overflowing with pluck and spirits. His mother had come to one of my meetings, and, like so many other mothers, I am thankful to say, had received a lifelong impression from what I said with regard to the training of boys, and she resolved, there and then, to act upon my advice with her own boys. She told me some two years after, that this boy had come in late one afternoon and explained to her that a little girl had asked him to direct her to rather an out-of-the-way house. "I thought she might ask that question of some one who would tell her wrong, or that she might come to some harm, so I thought I had better go with her and see her safe to the house." "But what of the cricket-match that you wanted so to see?" his mother asked. "Oh, I had to give that up. There wasn't time for both."

On another occasion, when a Christmas-tree was being prepared in the schoolroom for some choristers, as he and his mother left at dusk a chorister tried to force himself past her and gain a private view; and when she refused him admittance, not recognizing who she was, called her a very disrespectful name. Instantly the boy flew at him like a little tiger, "How dare you speak to my mother like that!" "I didn't see it was your mother," the chorister pleaded, trying to ward off the blows. "But you saw it was a woman, and somebody's mother, and you dare to speak to her like that!" And such a storm of fisticuffs fell on every part of that hulking young chorister's person as forced him at last to cry for mercy and promise that he would never do so again. That boy's master wrote to his mother towards the end of his school-time--he was a Bluecoat boy--and said that he positively dreaded his leaving, as his influence on the side of everything good, and pure, and high was quite that of a master.

And now I come to the question of religious teaching, which you may be surprised that I have not put first of all. First of all, in one sense, I do put it. There can be no greater safeguard to purity of life than vital religion. I do not go so far as some evangelical mothers who have told me that nothing less than the conversion of their boys would be of the least avail to keep them morally straight; on the contrary, I have known men who have never come under any strong religious influence, but have grown up sceptical scientific men, yet who have led lives as pure as any woman's. Common manhood, with the "Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world"; common love for mother and sister, which for their sakes maketh it impossible to wrong their womanhood, even when fallen into the dust; common self-respect, which is so strong in some men, and makes them shrink from anything in the nature of mud, is often sufficient to accomplish this end. But still, when all is said, if in answer to your mother's prayers you can implant in your boy a sense of the Divine Presence and the cry of the quickened conscience, "How can I do this great sin and wickedness against God?" you have doubtless given him the best panoply against the fiery darts of temptation. Only I would again warn you that there must be no forcing of the religious emotions, no effort to gather the fruits of the spirit before the root, in the shape of the great cardinal virtues everywhere presupposed in Christian ethics, has been nourished, and strengthened, and watered into strong, healthy growth. We have to bear in mind our Lord's words, which it seems to me religious parents sometimes forget, that there is an order of growth in spiritual things as in natural--first the blade, then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear; and we are not to try to force the full corn in the ear before the stalk and the blade have grown. For the want of laying to heart these words of the great Teacher, I have known much pulpy, emotional religion engrafted on young souls--admirably adapted to exhaust the soil, but with the smallest possible bearing upon right conduct; a religion perfectly at its ease with much scamping of lessons and hard work in general; indulgent of occasional cribbing, and of skilful manipulation of awkward truth, of betting and small extravagances; and innocent of all sense of dishonesty in allowing a struggling parent to pay large sums for education while the school-time so purchased, often at the cost of home comforts and pleasant outings, is squandered in idleness.

What a boy really needs, and, indeed, all immature things--for I found it equally true of immature men--is a simple, practical religion, based more on the facts of life and conscience than on doctrines and dogmas. To know God as his Father; to know that he has a Redeemer who laid down His life to save him from sin and who takes account of his smallest and most broken effort to do what is right; to realize that it is only so far as he is like Christ and in Christ that he can be really a man and work out what is highest in him; to know that he has been baptized into a Divine Society, binding him to fight against all wrong, both within and in the world without; above all, to know that there is a supreme spiritual Power within him and about him to enable him to do right, and that in the line of duty "I can't" is a lie in the lips that repeat, "I believe in the Holy Ghost"; this is as much as his young soul can assimilate, not as mere religious phrases, but as realities to live by.

"So nigh to glory is our dust, So nigh to God is man, When duty whispers low 'Thou must,' The soul replies, 'I can.'"

But see that beneath all this he has the special Christian teaching with regard to the sanctity of the body thoroughly instilled into him. If the Incarnation means anything, it means not the salvation and sanctification of a ghost, but the salvation and consecration of the whole man, of his body as well as his soul. True, the animal body to a spiritual being must always be a "body of humiliation," but nothing can be more unfortunate and misleading than the epithet in the Authorized Version of "vile" as a translation of the Greek word used by St. Paul. On the contrary, we are taught that even this mortal body is a temple of the Holy Ghost.

In teaching this there can be no difficulty; you can make use of a child's natural reverence for a church. You can say, "What would you think if you heard of some loose lads breaking into a church, and just for the fun of the thing strewing the aisles with cinder dust and all sorts of loose rubbish; tearing out the pages of Bibles and hymn-books to light their pipes, and getting drunk out of the chalice? You would be honestly shocked at such profanity. Nay, even in the dire exigencies of war we do not think better of the Germans for having stabled their horses in one of the French churches and left their broken beer-bottles on the high altar and the refuse of a stable strewn up and down the nave. Yet a church is, after all, only a poor earthly building, built by human hands. But there is one temple which God has built for Himself, the temple of man's body; and of that the terrible words are written, and ever fulfilled, "If any man defile that temple, him will God destroy." God's great gift of speech is not to be defiled by dirty talk, by profane language, by lies, or evil speaking. The organs which are given us for its sustenance are not to be denied by gluttony and piggishness, either in food or drink. The boy is not to use any part of his body in defiling ways which he would be ashamed for his own mother to know of. To do so is not only to defile, but--with the double meaning of the Greek word, which we cannot render into English--to destroy; to weaken his brain-power, which he wants for his work in life, to weaken his nervous system, lessening his strength thereby and rendering him less able to excel in athletics, and often, if carried to excess, in after-life bringing results which are the very embodiment of the terrible words, "Him will God destroy." The full force and bearing of this teaching he may not apprehend. I have already said that with a young boy the lower appeal never to do anything that is low and dirty and blackguardly will have far more practical weight, and will also avoid laying undue stress on the religious emotions. But I am quite sure that the Christian teaching of the sanctity of the body must be laid deep and strong with all the force of early impression in a boy's inmost being, in order that it may lie ready for future use when Nature has developed those instincts of manhood which will teach him its full significance.

If you are an Episcopalian, you will of course find the time of your boy's confirmation simply invaluable as one of those turning-points which will enable you to speak, or possibly write, more unreservedly than is possible on more ordinary occasions. I would earnestly ask you to give him a little White Cross confirmation paper called _Purity the Guard of Manhood_, a paper which an Eton master pronounced the best thing he had met with of the kind, and which has been widely used. Do not rest content with merely giving the paper in a perfunctory way, but follow it up with a few living, earnest words of your own.

Of course I should do a wrong to your womanly instincts if I were to think it necessary to say that the inculcation of purity must be always in a mother's heart, but only on her lips on some marked occasions, such as the first going to school, the last day of the holidays, or when your boy himself gives the occasion by some question he may ask you, but above all when he reaches a critical age, when a few words from your own lips will be worth all the printed pages in the world. Only ever and always make it an essential element of his idea of manliness to be pure, and do not forget constantly to couple the words "brave and pure," or "manly and pure," or "pure and high character," in his hearing; that he may be endued, not with that pale, emasculate thing that passes muster for purity nowadays, which always seems to me chiefly conscious of its own indecency, full of the old nervous "touch not, taste not, handle not" spirit, bandaged up with this restriction and that lest it fall to pieces, and when it comes to saving another from defilement in body and soul shuffling uneasily into a pair of lavender kid-gloves and muttering something about its being "such a very delicate subject"--nay, not this, but that militant sun-clad power which Milton dreamed of, rushing down like a sword of God to smite everything low, and base and impure; a purity as of mountain water or living fire, whose very nature it is, not only to be pure itself, but to destroy impurity in others.

V

And now let me throw together two or three practical suggestions, which will probably be superfluous to the most experienced mothers, but may be useful to younger and more inexperienced parents.

In the first place, I think there are few of the heads of the medical profession who would not agree with me that our English dietary is too stimulating and too abundant. Sir Andrew Clark certainly held that a large proportion of our diseases spring from over-eating and over-drinking. I don't suppose that for a boy it so much matters, as he is eating for "edification" as well as for sustenance, for the building up of his walls as well as for the nutrition of his existing frame. But "the boy is father to the man," and I would ask you not to accustom your boys to a rich dietary, as the habit once formed will be prolonged into early manhood, and undoubtedly such stimulating diet does greatly increase the temptations with which young men have to contend. It is perfectly unnecessary for the developing of strength and stature, as is shown by the splendid Scotchmen who yearly carry off some of our highest university distinctions and prizes--many of them farmer lads who have scarcely tasted meat in their boyhood, but have been brought up on the simple farinaceous food of the country. There was much force and meaning in the quaint congratulatory telegram sent by a friend to a Cambridge Senior Wrangler hailing from Scotland, "Three cheers for the parritge!" And that curious and most impressive fact which Mr. Bayard, the late American Ambassador, hunted up for our edification from various dictionaries of biography--the fact, namely, that a large proportion of our most eminent men spring from the homes of the poorer clergy, where certainly sumptuous fare and much meat do not obtain, is a proof that abstemious living, while forming a valuable discipline for the soul, does not injure but promotes the health of the body and the strength of the brain. Our having given up the religious uses of fasting I often think is a loss to young men; and it might, therefore, be as well if we were to imitate our "Corybantic" brethren, the Salvationists, and institute a week of self-denial, leaving the children to work out an economical dietary, with due care on our part that it should be fairly nutritious, and allowing them to give what they have saved from the ordinary household expenses to any cause in which they may be interested. It would give them a wholesome lesson in self-denial and cheap living; both lessons much needed in these luxurious days. But whether this suggestion finds favor or not, we have always to bear in mind that "plain living" is the necessary companion of "high thinking"--the lowly earth-born twin who waits upon her heavenly sister.

On the vexed question of the use of alcohol there was but one point on which there was a consensus of opinion in the discussion by our leading medical men, which appeared some years ago in the pages of the _Contemporary Review_. The point upon which they were all agreed was that alcohol is injurious to children, and if the boy has been accustomed from his early youth to do without it, and, as he grows up, remains a total abstainer, there is no question that his abstinence will prove a great safeguard; though I cannot go as far as some of my abstaining friends, who seem to regard the use of alcohol as the root of what must, in the nature of things, be one of the strongest primal passions of human nature, and therefore liable to abuse, whether men are total abstainers or not. Anyhow, though a lad can be trained to strict moderation, abstinence in both alcohol and tobacco must after a time come of the lad's own free will; the last thing that answers is to multiply and enforce restrictions; the rebound is inevitable and often fatal. But I do say that where there is a great pinching in the home in order to afford the educational advantages of school and university, it does show some radical defect in the training of our boys that they should indulge in such expensive habits, especially the expensive and wholly unnecessary habit of smoking, when the dear mother and young sisters are doing without many a little home comfort in order to meet the expense of the young rascal's education. One rich old grandmother whom I met abroad promised each of her grandsons fifty pounds if they would give up smoking; and it was marvellous how that stern necessity of doing as other young men do disappeared like their own tobacco smoke before the promise of that fifty pounds for their own pockets! They were all able to claim it one after the other. If boys were not trained by their mothers to be systematically selfish, might not the home-claims in the heart be as strong as those fifty pounds in the pocket?

Secondly, with regard to betting and gambling, which may be classed with drinking, as the fruitful parent of bad company, and a _descensus ad infernum_:--do you not think a boy may be best guarded against a habit of betting, which is so likely to lead on to gambling, by taking the same line as a boy of my acquaintance took with his mother when she was warning him against it: "Well, mother, you see, it always does seem so mean to me to get a fellow's money from him without giving him anything in return; it always does seem so like prigging, and some of our fellows are awfully hard up, and can't afford to lose a penny." Mr. Gladstone was evidently of the same opinion when he once said to his private secretary, Sir Edward Hamilton, that he "regarded gambling as nothing short of damnable. What can be the fun of winning other people's money?" This strikes me as a way of putting it which would appeal most forcibly to a boy; and if, in addition, we were to point out to him that, like all shady things, it has a tendency to grow and sharpen the man into a sharper and develop the blood-sucking apparatus of a leech, besides bringing wretchedness and misery on others, he might be led to resist the first beginnings of a betting habit which may lead on to gambling in after years.

And here I would say that the absolute absence of any training given to a boy in the right use and value of money, which has obtained till lately in our English schools, is surely suicidal and must lend itself to every form of abuse. I do not know whether it is the same with you, but many of our boys know money only in the form of pocket-money, when it becomes to him a metal token mostly signifying so much "tuck"; becoming, as he grows older, more and more deleterious "tuck" in the shape of billiards, betting, etc., and ending in a general going "on tick," which is worse still. But in this matter we are improving. I think most sensible parents nowadays place a small sum at their bank to the boy's account, with a check-book, making him responsible at first for small articles of clothing, neckties, shirt-collars, etc, and as soon as he shows himself trustworthy, for all his expenses except school bills. The boy is expected to keep accounts, get nothing without first asking the price, and to bring his receipted bills at the end of the term to his father, and see that they tally with his foils; and, above all, always to pay in ready money--unpaid bills being contemplated in the bald light of shop-lifting. To this I would add, if possible, the habit of giving the Jewish tenth, so as to make giving a steady principle, and not a hap-hazard impulse.

Thirdly, it is a vital point to give your boys interesting pursuits. There is great force in the rough old saying, "Never give the devil an empty chair to sit down upon, and you won't be much troubled with his company." Vice is constantly only idleness which has turned bad,--idleness being emphatically a thing that will not keep, but turns rotten. It is not the great industrial centres of our population that are chiefly ravaged by vice; it is the fashionable watering-places, the fashionable quarters of large towns, where idle men congregate, in which it is a "pestilence that walketh in darkness," and slays its thousands of young girls. "Empty by filling," has always been a favorite motto of mine. How many a young man has been driven to betting, drinking, and the race-course from the want of something of interest to fill his unoccupied hours, because more wholesome tastes have never been developed in him! Of course, tastes must be to a certain degree inborn, but I am quite sure that many a taste perishes, like a frost-bitten bud, full of the promise of blossom and fruit, because it has never been given the opportunity to develop.

Take a boy's innate love of collecting. Could you not develop it by the offer of a little prize for the best collection of dried flowers, of butterflies or insects, of birds' eggs, even, in some cases, of geological specimens, but, in any case, with the scientific and common names attached; so forming a healthy taste for natural history, which may be a source of perpetual interest and profit in after-life? Do not let your dislike of destroying life interfere; reverence for life can be as well, nay, better taught by insisting that only the necessary specimens should be given of each species, only one or two eggs taken from the nest, and the nest itself disturbed as little as possible. Chemistry and electricity also appeal to a boy's love of experimentizing and of making electrical contrivances, easily constructed of the commonest materials. As to hand-work, the lack of which in ill-health has made so many a man a torment both to himself and others, there ought to be no difficulty with regard to that. Carpentering, wood-carving, repoussé-work in metal, bent-iron work, mosaic work, any of these, except possibly the last, may be set on foot with very little expense, besides drawing, modelling, etc. Where there are sufficient means it would be a good thing if boys were taught, as far as may be, how things are made and the amount of toil that goes into the simplest article. I remember giving a small printing-press to a boy of ours--an excellent gift, by the by, for a lad, and it can be had for five or six shillings--and his coming to me soon after with a match-box in his hand, exclaiming with wonderment, "Why, auntie, there are six different kinds of type on this match-box!" If they could learn how to build, how rafters and joists are put in, and construct as much as a miniature summer-house in the garden, how useful this being able to turn their hands to anything might prove to them in their after-life. And with what added respect they would look upon all labor if they had never looked upon it as the part of a "gentleman" to stand aloof from it.

Lastly, but not least, I would plead most earnestly for the frequent home-letter, should your boy be sent to a boarding-school. If you would have him resist the temptations of school life, keep the home as close to his heart and as present to his mind as you can. Make it your first and paramount duty to write every day if you can, if not every other day, at least twice a week.

Do not misunderstand me here. God knows I do not go in for the devoted mother who thinks of nothing but her boys and to whom the whole world besides is nothing but an empty flourish of the pen about their names. Such mothers are like Chinese teacups, with no perspective and everything out of proportion; where the Mandarin is as big as the Pagoda, and suffers from a pathetic inability to get in at his own door. You must see things in moral perspective in order to train character on large and noble lines. And it is from the rough quarry of the outside world, with its suffering and sin, that you must fetch the most precious stones for the building up of true manhood or womanhood. The sooner children are taught that their small concerns must be subordinated at times to the needs of the sick, the poor, and the suffering, the better for them. For a mother, therefore, to undertake _some_ outside work may and will prove the best element in their education, enabling them in their turn to live in relation with the world in which God has placed them and do their part in the service of humanity.

All that I mean is, do not so crowd your life with outside work or social engagements as to have no time to spare for this daily or at least bi-weekly letter to the boys at school. Bear in mind that the most important work you can do for the world is the formation of noble character, building it up stone by stone as you alone can do. Do not be too busy to make yourself your boy's friend and throw yourself heartily into all that interests him. I have known philanthropic mothers to whom cricket was nothing but an unmeaning scurrying backwards and forwards, and who scarcely knew the stern of a boat from its bows!

And what a liberal education a mother's home-letters to her boys at school might be made! The stirring incident in the newspapers, the fine passage in the book, a verse or two of a noble poem, as well as all the loving thought and prayer that is for ever flying like homing birds to the dear absent lads, and the inculcation of all things lovely and pure and manly, brightened by home jokes and the health of the last cherished pet--all these things might go to make up the home letters. Above all, what an opportunity it would give for pleading the cause of the little chaps who, by some strange insanity working in the brain of the British parent, are sent into the rough world of a large school when they are fitter for the nursery, and whom you might appeal to your boys to look after and protect, so far as they are able; and not only these, but to side with every boy who is being bullied for acting up to his conscience or because he has not the pluck to stand up for himself.

In conclusion, I would earnestly ask you to believe in your own power when united to the knowledge which is necessary to direct it. "A man is what a woman makes him," says the old saw. Look back upon the men you have known who have been touched to finest issues, and you will find, with few exceptions, that they are the shaping of a noble woman's hands--a noble mother, a noble wife, a noble sister. Doubt not, but earnestly believe that with those wonderful shaping hands of yours you can mould that boy of yours into the manhood of Sir Galahad, "whose strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure"; that you can send him forth into the world like King Arthur, of whom our own poet, Spenser, says, that the poorest, the most unprotected girl could feel that

"All the while he by his side her bore She was as safe as in a sanctuary."

Nay, may I not go further still and say that by the grace of God you can send him forth "made of a woman" in the image of the strong and tender Manhood of Jesus Christ, to Whom even the poor lost girls out of the street could come and know that here was a Man who would not drag them down, but lift them up; believing in Whom, clinging to Whom, trusting in Whom, they grew no longer lost and degraded, but splendid saints of the Christian Church.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 11: _Morality in Public Schools_, by Dr. Butler, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and late Head-Master of Harrow.]

[Footnote 12: _The Preservation of Health_, by Clement Dukes, M.D., M.R.C.S., Howard Medallist, Statistical Society of London, p. 150.]

[Footnote 13: _Ibid._, p. 157.]

[Footnote 14: _A Confidential Talk with the Boys of America_, by J.M. Dick. Fleming H. Revell Co.]

[Footnote 15: See Appendix.]

[Footnote 16: See _Parents' Review_, No. 5, July, 1895, p. 351.]

[Footnote 17: have quoted here from _The Ascent of Man_ by Professor Drummond, pp. 292, 293; but any standard work on botany will give you the method of the fertilization of plants in greater detail.]

[Footnote 18: _Ibid._, p. 310.]

[Footnote 19: Erroneously called neuter, as in reality it is an imperfectly developed female, and is only capable of producing males.]

[Footnote 20: I owe my first clear apprehension of the gradual evolution of the preservative and altruistic elements in nature, arising from the struggle for existence, to a sermon of Dr. Abbott's called _The Manifestation of the Son of God_, now, I fear, out of print. Of course Darwin recognized these factors as a necessary complement to the survival of the fittest, else had there been no fittest to survive; but the exigencies of proving his theory of the origin of species necessitated his dwelling on the destructive and weeding-out elements of Nature--"Nature red in tooth and claw," rather than the equally pervasive Nature of the brooding wing and the flowing breast. Had not Professor Drummond unfortunately mixed it up with a good deal of extraneous sentiment, his main thesis would scarcely have been impugned.]

[Footnote 21: In case this method of teaching should seem to some mothers too difficult, I intend to embody it in a simple "Mother's Talk on Life and Birth," which a mother can read with her boys.]

[Footnote 22: See a White Cross paper of mine called _My Little Sister_. Wells Gardner, Darton and Co., London.]

[Footnote 23: Twice since the wreck of the _Birkenhead_ has the same true manhood been evinced on the high seas in the face of almost certain death--once in the wreck of the troopship, the _Warren Hastings_, and again by the crew and the civilian passengers of the _Stella_. Perfect order was maintained, and though, ultimately all the men were saved, not a man stirred hand or foot to save himself till the women and children had first been safely got on shore.]

[Footnote 24: _French and English_, by Philip Hamerton, p. 44.]

[Footnote 25: _The British Zulu_. Wells Gardner, Darton and Co., London.]