and strident a voice she may deny it.  Whatever changes in the position of women may take place, the basic fact remains, and will always remain, the man is stronger than the woman, and his strength is given him to serve the weaker; and you have got to get your girls to be your fellow-helpers in developing all that is best and most chivalrous in their brothers, and not so to run riot in their independence as to substitute a boyish camaraderie for the exquisite relations of the true man to the true woman.

There rises up now before me a boy, one of those delightful English boys overflowing with pluck and spirits.  His mother had come to one of my meetings, and, like so many other mothers, I am thankful to say, had received a lifelong impression from what I said with regard to the training of boys, and she resolved, there and then, to act upon my advice with her own boys.  She told me some two years after, that this boy had come in late one afternoon and explained to her that a little girl had asked him to direct her to rather an out-of-the-way house.  “I thought she might ask that question of some one who would tell her wrong, or that she might come to some harm, so I thought I had better go with her and see her safe to the house.”  “But what of the cricket-match that you wanted so to see?” his mother asked.  “Oh, I had to give that up.  There wasn’t time for both.”

On another occasion, when a Christmas-tree was being prepared in the schoolroom for some choristers, as he and his mother left at dusk a chorister tried to force himself past her and gain a private view; and when she refused him admittance, not recognizing who she was, called her a very disrespectful name.  Instantly the boy flew at him like a little tiger, “How dare you speak to my mother like that!” “I didn’t see it was your mother,” the chorister pleaded, trying to ward off the blows.  “But you saw it was a woman, and somebody’s mother, and you dare to speak to her like that!” And such a storm of fisticuffs fell on every part of that hulking young chorister’s person as forced him at last to cry for mercy and promise that he would never do so again.  That boy’s master wrote to his mother towards the end of his school-time—­he was a Bluecoat boy—­and said that he positively dreaded his leaving, as his influence on the side of everything good, and pure, and high was quite that of a master.

And now I come to the question of religious teaching, which you may be surprised that I have not put first of all.  First of all, in one sense, I do put it.  There can be no greater safeguard to purity of life than vital religion.  I do not go so far as some evangelical mothers who have told me that nothing less than the conversion of their boys would be of the least avail to keep them morally straight; on the contrary, I have known men who have never come under any strong religious influence, but have grown up sceptical scientific men, yet who have led lives as pure as any woman’s.  Common manhood,