,
a healthful regimen, energetic habits, amusements and physical fatigue
are diversions so useful that, thanks to them, the most critical years
pass by unnoticed.[49]

A daily cold shower, followed by a vigorous rubdown, is beneficial if the
boy reacts favorably to it. The bath, acts as a sedative.

The value of gymnasium work, track and field athletics, swimming, and
"hiking" is constantly demonstrated in the lives of American boys.

Athletics are to be recommended as possessing a positive prophylactic
value against the indulgence of sensual propensities. Physical
exercise serves as an outlet for the superabundant energy which might
otherwise be directed toward the sexual sphere. In the period of
"storm and stress" which characterizes pubescence and which often
leads to nervous perturbation and excitement ... there is no better
divertitive from sexual thoughts than active athletic exercises pushed
to the point of physical fatigue, as a relief to nerve tension.[50]

In addition, physical exercise tends to develop an ambition to excel, to
become physically strong and robust. With such an ambition, boys realize,
intuitively to a certain extent, that to succeed they must refrain from
vice. Physical exercise has a fourfold moral value: it substitutes
wholesome activity for vice; it serves as an outlet for excess of nervous
energy; it develops the will; it develops ambition to be virile. All
wholesome recreation is an enemy of impurity. Jane Addams says that
recreation is stronger than vice, and that recreation alone can stifle the
lust for vice.[51] Recreation which involves physical activity is the most
helpful to the adolescent boy.

The boy's companions are important. Emerson says, "You send your child to
the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him."[52] Books
which contain high ideals of manhood and also of womanhood are obviously
helpful, as are also dramas of this character. And finally those general
principles of moral and religious education must be used, without which
we can have no strong foundation for clean living.

If we have failed to give proper instruction previous to adolescence, we
now have a golden opportunity (and in thousands of cases, our last
opportunity) to save the adolescent to a life of purity. As a rule, he has
ideas of sex life which are, at least, unwholesome. Curiosity is at a high
pitch, and passion is likely to be strong. Neverth