Yes there is a remedy—­I believe a specific—­which can rapidly and, I think, finally restore strength to the enfeebled will and order the unclean spirit to come out of the man.  It is hypnotic suggestion.  Let not the reader, however, think that the matter is a simple one.  In all ages any great advance in the art of healing has, by the ignorant, been attributed to the powers of darkness.  The Divine Healer Himself did not escape from the charge of casting out devils by the prince of the devils, and, while hypnotic suggestion has long been used for therapeutic purposes on the Continent and is now practised in Government institutions there, the doctor or clergyman or teacher who uses it in England runs great risks; for in this subject, as in all others, it is those who are entirely without experience who are most dogmatic.

In the case of the schoolmaster, its use in this connection is practically excluded.  If he applies to a parent for permission to use it he probably runs his head against a blank wall of ignorance; for hypnotism, to most people, means a dangerous power by which an unscrupulous, strong-willed Svengali dominates an abnormally weak-willed Trilby whose will continues to grow weaker until the subject becomes a mere automaton; and most of us would rightly prefer that a boy should be his own master—­even if he were rushing to headlong ruin—­than that he should be the mere puppet of the most saintly man living.  The human will is sacred and inviolable, and we do unwisely if we seek to control it or to remove those obstacles from its way by which alone it can gain divine strength.  Meanwhile the stimulus by which the mind acquires self-mastery usually comes from without in the form of spiritual inspiration; and to remove from a boy’s path an obstacle which blocks it and is entirely beyond his own strength is equally desirable both in the physical and in the spiritual realm.  Those who think that without this obstacle a boy’s power of self-control is likely to receive insufficient exercise will, of course, object to the instruction advocated in this book.  If it is unwise to remove this obstacle from a boy’s path it is equally unwise so to instruct him as to prevent the obstacle from arising.  In trustworthy hands hypnotic suggestion is a beneficent power which has no dangers and no drawbacks, and to decline to use it is to accept a very serious responsibility.

For the teacher a further difficulty—­not to mention that of time—­is that, without betraying a boy’s confidence or inducing him to allow his admissions to be passed on to his father, it is impossible to give his parents an idea of the urgency of the case.

Altogether the time for hypnotic suggestion in education is not yet, but the day must come when its use is recognised not only in physical cases such as nocturnal emissions and constipation, but in all cases in which the will-power is practically in abeyance, as it is in bad cases of impurity.