social, moral, and religious ends.  Of course the young man may discover, after a while, that the first object of his fancy is not so angelic as he thought.  By and by his fancy changes and may rove to several other maidens before he reaches maturity; but each successive experience, if he is true to his better self, concentrates his affections and directs them, until, if he is fortunate, in the course of time he finds his true mate and enters upon marriage.  He is now fairly equipped for what most of us know to be a long course in the discipline of the selfish, the personal, the more or less brute desires and ambitions of man.  Here he learns to subject himself, his own comfort, his own ends, his own ambitions, to the good of his wife and her happiness, to the good of his children and the satisfaction of their needs.  Then, more and more, after having concentrated the powers of his spirit through faithful courtship and through happy marriage and fatherhood, the man is able to diffuse these same energies through many channels, for the protection of all sorts and conditions of women and children.  The man is now a citizen, a member of society, with developed powers of social sympathy, of social energy.  How has he developed these powers?  Not by any supposition that the early sex instincts he felt in his boyhood were wholly animal and must be atrophied by disuse, but by gathering and directing them into the right channels.  Direction, like control, depends upon enlightened, purposeful, persistent love.

In the third place, we may consider how, in matters of sex, the flesh and the soul may grow together in mutual help.  The essential facts and the vital importance of the sex life appeal to the developing boy or girl in four great relations, in relation to father and mother, in relation to the strength and grace of his or her own body and mind, in relation to his or her future family, and in relation to society in general.  These appeals come in successive periods and open the way to healthful instruction and guidance from childhood up to manhood and womanhood.

Sex questions first arise in the child’s mind in connection with parenthood.  The first thing a little boy or girl needs to know is that the young life is sheltered and fed during long months in the mother’s body, and that the father had a share in that life.  Is it not amazing that in this twentieth century we find many girls twelve years old and over who do not know that their father had any share in starting their lives?  I knew of a girl nineteen years old, a student in college, who did not know that a man had any essential part in bringing children into the world, but supposed, when any question of illegitimate childbirth was raised, that possibly God punished a bad woman by sending her a baby before she was married.  It is little short of criminal that many girls are allowed to reach adolescence with no sex thought or image clearly in their minds except such as they have received directly or indirectly from