Men’s habitual words and acts imply that they are at liberty to treat their bodies as they please.  Disorder entailed by disobedience to nature’s dictates they regard as grievances, not as the effects of a conduct more or less flagitious.  Though the evil consequences inflicted on their descendents and on future generations are often as great as those caused by crime, they do not think themselves in any degree criminal.

It is true that in the case of drunkenness the viciousness of a bodily transgression is recognized; but none appear to infer that if this bodily transgression is vicious, so too is every bodily transgression.  The fact is, all breaches of the law of health are physical sins.

When this is generally seen, then, and perhaps not till then, will the physical training of the young receive all the attention it deserves.

Purity of life and thought should be taught in the home.  It is the only safeguard of the young.  Let parents wake up on this important subject.

[Illustration:  Gladstone.]

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Value of reputation.

1.  Who shall estimate the cost.—­Who shall estimate the cost of a priceless reputation—­that impress which gives this human dross its currency—­without which we stand despised, debased, depreciated?  Who shall repair it injured?  Who can redeem it lost?  Oh, well and truly does the great philosopher of poetry esteem the world’s wealth as “trash” in the comparison.  Without it gold has no value; birth, no distinction; station, no dignity; beauty, no charm; age, no reverence; without it every treasure impoverishes, every grace deforms, every dignity degrades, and all the arts, the decorations and accomplishments of life stand, like the beacon-blaze upon a rock, warning the world that its approach is dangerous; that its contact is death.

2.  The wretch without it.—­The wretch without it is under eternal quarantine; no friend to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril, and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence.  But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or individual exposure this individual principle; it testifies a higher, a more ennobling origin.

3.  Its divinity.—­Oh, Divine, oh, delightful legacy of a spotless reputation:  Rich is the inheritance it leaves; pious the example it testifies; pure, precious and imperishable, the hope which it inspires; can there be conceived a more atrocious injury than to filch from its possessor this inestimable benefit to rob society of its charm, and solitude of its solace; not only to out-law life, but attain death, converting the very grave, the refuge of the sufferer, into the gate of infamy and of shame.