The larger bodies, the large heart and lungs, well oxygenated blood, and fresh vitality of every artery and tissue, gives a buoyance, a strength and a courage, a source of power and sense of it too, a longing for complete freedom, a revolt against all control, which the boy will never feel later; if he does not feel it now.  I am describing, perhaps, rather the college boy than the high school boy; but bear this in mind, that I am describing what your boys in the high school will be a year or two later if they are not that now, and it is for this stage you must prepare them, even, if they have not already entered upon it.

A new, wide world, just as fresh as on the morning of creation, a new fire, a life of boundless opportunity, which is endless in scope and time, are opening out before the boy and the girl.  They see the parents and the teachers drag around, understanding, as they think, neither them nor life itself; and they are right to a certain extent.  There is no doubt about that; we do not hold on to the vision of glory of this world and of this life which we had in youth as we ought to and as it is our duty to do.  The boy and the girl criticize us fairly, when they think that we don’t appreciate this magnificent world in which we live.

When a man gets to be my age, while I suppose he probably has more humility, he comes to know and he comes to have a very cheerful, optimistic view of the world.  He has made up his mind that the Lord does not intend to change the world a great deal anyhow, and, on the whole, he is very much content to leave it the way it is.  That is not so with young people at all.  The boy and the girl must learn and know all about it.  That is one thing they are determined to do at the outset.  The boy girds up his loins and he goes whither he will.  He must taste of every experience for himself.  He will meet joy and sorrow with the same frolicking, welcoming spirit.  He has never been saddened by experience nor disillusioned by disappointment and failure.  He will try all the knowledge of good and evil if it costs him Paradise.

Nature is loosening every leading string now and is getting him free to complete his own individual development and to forge his own character.  We cannot stop him if we would.  It is very lucky that we cannot.  It is better that we should not stop him even if we could; nevertheless, he has very little self-knowledge and still less self-control.  Impulses well up from changes going on within him or from stimuli which come to him from without.  He does not understand them.  He does not know where they come from.  He does not know what they mean.  He is ill-prepared to face them, and now he goes one way and now the other.  He has just about as clear a conception of the value of time as a child has.  He has not outgrown childhood in that respect.  He cannot possibly play a waiting game.  That is the last thing that he can do.  If the sun shines to-day it is always going to be bright weather.  If the maiden of his adoration frowns to-day, the sun will never shine again.  He is either on the Delectable Mountain or in the Valley of Humiliation, and he is far more frequently in the latter than we think.  He is rarely between the two, and he is not going to tell us when he is in the Valley of Humiliation, nor when he is on the top of the Delectable Mountain.