Oliver Wendell Holmes[4] tells us that in religion certain words and ideas become “polarised,” that is to say, charged with forces of powerful suggestion, and must be “depolarised.”

[Footnote 4:  The Professor at the Breakfast Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes.]

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“I don’t know what you mean by ‘depolarising’ an idea, said the divinity-student.

“I will tell you, I said.  When a given symbol which represents a thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it undergoes a change like that which rest in a certain position gives to iron.  It becomes magnetic in its relations—­it is traversed by strange forces which did not belong to it.  The word, and consequently the idea it represents, is polarised.

“The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in print, consists entirely of polarised words.  Borrow one of these from another language and religion, and you will find it leaves all its magnetism behind it.  Take that famous word, O’m, of the Hindoo mythology.  Even a priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy Pundit would shut his ears and run away from you in horror, if you should say it aloud.  What do you care for O’m?  If you wanted to get the Pundit to look at his religion fairly, you must first depolarise this and all similar words for him.  The argument for and against new translations of the Bible really turns on this.  Scepticism is afraid to trust its truths in depolarised words, and so cries out against a new translation.  I think, myself, if every idea our Book contains could be shelled out of its old symbol and put into a new, clean, unmagnetic word, we should have some chance of reading it as philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it—­which we do not and cannot now, any more than a Hindoo can read the ‘Gayatri’ as a fair man and lover of truth should do.”

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Now in the minds of many boys and some girls certain words and ideas connected with certain physiological processes become polarised.  It is the parents’ duty to depolarise them.  It is a task which cannot well be deputed to others; nor can much help be derived from books, though many have been written with the object of initiating children into the mysteries of sex.  No one but a parent is likely to be on sufficiently intimate terms with the child to enable the subject to be approached without restraint or awkwardness, and no book can adapt itself to the varying needs of individual children.  An exposition in cold print, or a single formal lecture on the subject, is apt to do more harm than good.  I have seen instructions to parents to deliver themselves of set speeches, examples of which are given, which seem to me well calculated to repel and frighten the nervous child.  Still more dangerous is the advice to make sexual hygiene a subject for class study.  The task requires that parents should be upon very