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.]