are hopelessly hoodwinked.  But this double life is not long confined to the subject of purity.  The concealment which serves one purpose excellently can be made to serve another; and henceforth parents and adult friends need never know anything but what they are told.  It is a sad day for the mother when first she realises that the old frankness has gone; it is a very, very much sadder day for the boy.  There is no fibre of his moral being but is, or will be, injured by this divorce of home influences and by this ever-accumulating burden of guilty memories.  “His mother may not know why this is so,” writes Canon Lyttelton; “the only thing she may be perfectly certain of is that the loss will never be quite made up as long as life shall last.”

Another injury done by impurity to the growing mind of the lad is that, in all matters relating to sex, he learns to look merely for personal enjoyment.  In every other department of life he is moved by a variety of motives:  by the desire to please, the desire to excel, by devotion to duty, by the love of truth, and by many other desires.  Even in gratifying the appetite most nearly on the same plane as the sexual appetite—­namely, that of hunger—­he has more or less regard for his own well-being, more or less consideration for the wishes of others, and a constant desire to attain the standard expected of him.  Meanwhile, as regards the sexual appetite—­the racial importance of which is great; and the regulation of which is of infinite importance for himself, for those who may otherwise become its victims, for the wife he may one day wed, and for the children, legitimate or illegitimate, that he may beget—­his one idea is personal enjoyment.  One deplorable result of this idea will be adverted to in the next chapter.

When boyish impurity involves a coarse way of looking at sexual relations, as it always must when these are matters of common talk and jest, the boy suffers a loss which prejudicially affects the whole tone of his mind and every department of his conduct—­I mean the loss of reverence.  It is those things alone which are sacred to us, those things about which we can talk only with friends, and about which we can jest with no one, that have inspiration in them, that can give us power to follow our ideals and to lay a restraining hand on the brute within us.  Fortunately the self-control which manifests itself in heroism, in good form, and in the sportsmanlike spirit is sacred to almost all.  To most, a mother’s love is sacred.  To many, all that is implied in the word religion.  To a few, sexual passion and the great manifestations of human genius in poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture.  Exactly in proportion as these things are profaned by jest and mockery, is the light of the soul quenched and man degraded to the level of the beast.  Considering how large a part the sex-passion plays in the lives of most men and women; considering how it permeates the literature and art of the World and is—­as