In emphasizing the nature of the physician’s task in this matter as purely and simply that of wise practical enlightenment, nothing is implied against the advantages, and indeed the immense value in sexual hygiene, of the moral, religious, ideal elements of life.  It is not the primary business of the physician to inspire these, but they have a very intimate relation with the sexual life, and every boy and girl at puberty, and never before puberty, should be granted the privilege—­and not the duty or the task—­of initiation into those elements of the world’s life which are, at the same time, natural functions of the adolescent soul.  Here, however, is the sphere of the religious or ethical teacher.  At puberty he has his great opportunity, the greatest he can ever obtain.  The flower of sex that blossoms in the body at puberty has its spiritual counterpart which at the same moment blossoms in the soul.  The churches from of old have recognized the religious significance of this moment, for it is this period of life that they have appointed as the time of confirmation and similar rites.  With the progress of the ages, it is true, such rites become merely formal and apparently meaningless fossils.  But they have a meaning nevertheless, and are capable of being again vitalized.  Nor in their spirit and essence should they be confined to those who accept supernaturally revealed religion.  They concern all ethical teachers, who must realize that it is at puberty that they are called upon to inspire or to fortify the great ideal aspirations which at this period tend spontaneously to arise in the youth’s or maiden’s soul.[38]

The age of puberty, I have said, marks the period at which this new kind of sexual initiation is called for.  Before puberty, although the psychic emotion of love frequently develops, as well as sometimes physical sexual emotions that are mostly vague and diffused, definite and localized sexual sensations are rare.  For the normal boy or girl love is usually an unspecialized emotion; it is in Guyau’s words “a state in which the body has but the smallest place.”  At the first rising of the sun of sex the boy or girl sees, as Blake said he saw at sunrise, not a round yellow body emerging above the horizon, or any other physical manifestation, but a great company of singing angels.  With the definite eruption of physical sexual manifestation and desire, whether at puberty or later in adolescence, a new turbulent disturbing influence appears.  Against the force of this influence, mere intellectual enlightenment, or even loving maternal counsel—­the agencies we have so far been concerned with—­may be powerless.  In gaining control of it we must find our auxiliary in the fact that puberty is the efflorescence not only of a new physical but a new psychic force.  The ideal world naturally unfolds itself to the boy or girl at puberty.  The magic of beauty, the instinct of modesty, the naturalness of self-restraint, the idea of unselfish love, the meaning of duty, the