“A perfect woman, nobly planned,
    To warn, to comfort, and command;
    And yet a spirit still, and bright
    With something of an angel light.”

The boy thus mothered is saved as a rule from all physical risk.

And this in part anticipates my second point.  You cannot let this question alone if you are to aim at the highest for your boy.  High character is more to be accounted of than long life.  And it is to you, as a woman, that the guarding of the higher springs of his nature is especially entrusted.  My whole experience has gone to teach me, with ever-increasing force, that the proposition that purity is vitally necessary for the woman, but of comparatively small account for the man, is absolutely false.  Granted that, owing to social ostracism, the outward degradation of impurity to the woman is far greater, I contend that a deeper inner debasement is its sure fruition in the man.  Cruelty and lies are its certain accompaniment.  As Burns, with a poet’s insight, has truly said: 

    “But oh! it hardens a’ within,
       And petrifies the feeling.”

Yes, it is exactly that; “it hardens all within”—­hardens and darkens.  It is as our Lord says:  only “the pure in heart” are capable of divine vision.  Only the man who has kept himself pure, who has never sullied his white faith in womanhood, never profaned the sacred mysteries of life and love, never fouled his manhood in the stye of the beast—­it is only that man who can see God, who can see duty where another sees useless sacrifice, who can see and grasp abiding principles in a world of expediency and self-interest, and discern

    “In temporal policy the eternal Will,”

who can see God in the meanest of His redeemed creatures.  It is only the virginal heart that has kept itself pure, that grows not old, but keeps its freshness, its innocent gaiety, its simple pleasures.  The eminent Swiss Professor, Aime Humbert, does but echo these words from the sadder side, when, speaking of the moral malady which is the result of impurity, he says: 

“It does not attack any single organ of the human frame, but it withers all that is human—­mind, body, and soul.  It strikes our youth at the unhappy moment when they first cross the thresholds of vice.  For them the spring has no more innocent freshness; their very friendships are polluted by foul suggestions and memories; they become strangers to all the honorable relations of a pure young life; and thus we see stretching wider and wider around us the circle of this mocking, faded, worn-out, sceptical youth, without poetry and without love, without faith and without joy.”

Too soon and too earnestly we cannot teach our boys that the flaming sword, turning all ways, which guards the tree of life for him, is purity.