Does such an attitude contribute to man’s highest good and to the strength and scope of religious control?  Is it better to alienate and outlaw so important a phase of human existence or to bring it into intelligent accord with the divine will?  Is it not conceivable that in this field, as in every other that is normal to human life, there will be a gain to humanity, and to the value of religion as a helper of mankind, by a frank attempt to bring the whole life to the dignifying conception of a reasonable service to one’s Maker?

Granting that such an attempt is desirable, we come face to face with the necessity of imparting such information as will make the boy’s way of duty plain, and will elevate the subject to a place of purity and religious worth.  In this process of instruction, which is nothing less than a sacred responsibility, the most common fault of the parent, physician, teacher, and pastor is that of delay.  By the time a boy is eight years of age, he should have been informed as to his residence within and his birth from his mother, and this in such a way as wonderfully to deepen his love for her, and to beget in him a respect for all women to the end of his life.

It is well that the mother should first inform him in that spirit of utmost confidence which shall preclude his indiscriminate talk with other people upon this subject.  He should know, too, that further information will be given as he needs it, and that he can trust his parents to be frank and true with him in this as in everything else.  By all means let the mother tell the story and not some unfortunately vicious or polluted companion.  There are three reasons at least for informing him thus early in life.  One is that sufficient curiosity has usually developed by this time, another is that the first information should come from a pure source, and a third is that this instruction should anticipate sex consciousness and the indecent language and suggestions of school and street.

In the same spirit will the father impart to the boy a little later the fact of the original residence within himself of the seed from which the boy grew.  By the father’s reverent treatment of the subject in the hour of a boy’s confidence, and in response to his just curiosity, he may hallow forever the boy’s conception of the marriage relation and emphasize the vast amount of tenderness and regard that is due every mother.  For the boy to feel sure that he has been told the truth by his father, and to realize that his father regards these facts in an honorable and clean way, will rob a thousand indecent stories of their damage.

It belongs to the father to redeem the boy’s idea of human procreation from obscenity, and, under right conditions, to have this process regarded by his boy as the most wonderful responsibility that falls to man.  Sometime before the boy has reached thirteen, the father will have explained to him the facts and temptations of the pubescent period.  The crime of allowing boys in middle and later adolescence to worry themselves sick over normal nocturnal emissions, and often to fall into the hands of the quack, or of the advocate of illicit intercourse, lies at the door of the negligent father.