Now, you will see at once the intensely practical bearing of this teaching on the training of your boys.  You are not called to hit down directly on the evil, to give warnings against vice, or to speak on things which your womanhood unspeakably shrinks from mentioning.  What you are called to do is to secure, so far as you can, that the mind and soul moves on its own proper plane.  It is more an attitude you have to form than a warning you have to give.  And here it is that the imperative need of high positive teaching comes in.  Till parents, and especially mothers, recognize their God-given functions as the moral teachers of their own children, till they cease to shunt off their responsibilities on the professional shoulders of the schoolmaster, we had better frankly give up the whole question in despair.  Strange and sad it seems to me that at the end of the nineteenth century after the coming of our Lord I should have to plead that the moral law is possible under every condition to any man, and that parents are ipso facto the moral teachers of their own children.  And yet it is the denial, tacit or explicit, of these two primary truths that has been the greatest obstacle to the progress of my work.

But I appeal to you:  Who but a mother can bring such a constant and potent influence to bear as to secure the mind and character moving on its own higher plane in relation to the whole of this side of our nature?  Who so well as a mother can teach the sacredness of the body as the temple of the Eternal?  Who else can implant in her son that habitual reverence for womanhood which to a man is “as fountains of sweet water in the bitter sea” of life?  Who like a mother, as he grows to years of sense and observation, and the curiosity is kindled, which is only a cry for light and teaching, can so answer the cry and so teach as to make the mysteries of life and truth to be for ever associated for him with all the sacred associations of home and his own mother, and not with the talk of the groom or the dirty-minded schoolboy?  Who so well as a mother, as he passes into dawning manhood, can plead faithfulness to the future wife before marriage as well as after?  Nay, as I hold by the old Spanish proverb “An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy,” who like a mother, by her prayers and ever-present example and influence, can lead him to the Highest, and impress upon him that his life is given him for no lower end than, in the words of the Westminster Confession, “to know God and to glorify Him for ever”; and that therefore he is made on a very high plan—­as Browning puts it, “Heaven’s consummate cup,” whose end is to slake “the Master’s thirst”; and that the cup from which He drinks must be clean inside as well as out, and studded within and without with the pearl of purity?