Religion and the law together have the right to say to the unprotected girl, lacking wisdom, without discretion, eager for fun and adventure, ignorant of danger, thou shall not.  The words should be written over every unchaperoned or inadequately chaperoned high school dance, over the public dance hall, over the cabaret, over the vaudeville where the vulgar hides behind a mask, over every place which by its very nature opens doors of temptation and lowers powers of resistance.  The teachers of religion, and all agencies for moral training and uplift, because of the comparative helplessness of girlhood, have the right to teach by every means at their command thou shalt not.

Some one must teach the growing girl that extravagance is sin; some one must say thou shalt not to her common faults of promising without thought of the cost of keeping the promise, of exaggeration and untruthfulness.  Some one must help her see the utter folly of snobbishness and false pride.  In some way she must be taught the cruelty and meanness of gossip, the results of a sharp tongue and a critical spirit.  She must be shown the sin of ingratitude and the curse of jealousy and envy.  In fact the old ten commandments are needed by the girlhood of today as truly as they were needed by that great army of people in the days of the youth of a race, when their great law giver and leader strove to save them from the results of their own ignorance and newly acquired liberty.

Who teaches thou shalt not to the girl of today?  Indirectly, a great many people.  Directly, clearly, definitely so that she understands and is impressed, very few.  The Sunday-school in a half-hour a week attempts to do it, but the Sunday-school reaches a very small part of the girlhood of our land, and its work with those whom it has reached is often ineffective.  It is at present engaged in a serious effort to make its teachings more effective and far reaching.  The public school is not directly teaching the thou shalt not, for teaching it does not mean saying it, in the form of a command.  It does much indirect moral teaching, which is invaluable.  It is experimenting with direct moral teaching and many of the experiments have shown highly gratifying results, which lead us to hope that the day is not far distant when direct teaching of the common laws of moral living shall find a place in every school.  We shall have to find some new definition first, for such words as success, wealth, honesty, courage, honor and the long list in the vocabularies which the pupils in every school make for themselves.

In reacting against the thundering negatives of the past, the church has, in the decade or more that lies behind us, been teaching an unbalanced religion.  “Thou shalt,” and “thou shalt not” must be taught together if the best results are to be reached.  In individual instances so great success has been won by the teacher of religion that his method is worth one’s earnest study.