, let him take warning from my life's ruin."

What a magnificent specimen of manhood this would have been if his life
had been under the rule of reason, not passion! He dies of old age at
forty, his hair is gray, his eyes are sunken, his complexion sodden,
his body marked with the labels of his disease. A physique fit for a
god, fashioned in the Creator's image, with infinite possibilities, a
physiological hulk wrecked on passion's seas, and fit only for a danger
signal to warn the race. What would parents think of a captain who
would leave his son in charge of a ship without giving him any
instructions or chart showing the rocks, reefs, and shoals? Do they
not know that those who sleep in the ocean are but a handful compared
with those who have foundered on passion's seas? Oh, the sins of
silence which parents commit against those dearer to them than life
itself! Youth can not understand the great solicitude of parents
regarding their education, their associations, their welfare generally,
and the mysterious silence in regard to their physical natures. An
intelligent explanation, by all mothers to the daughters and by all
fathers to the sons, of the mysteries of their physical lives, when at
the right age, would revolutionize civilization.

This young clergyman killed himself trying to be popular. This student
committed suicide by exhausting his brain in trying to lead his class.
This young lawyer overdrew his account at Nature's bank, and she
foreclosed by a stroke of paralysis.

This merchant died at thirty-five by his own hand. His life was
slipping away without enjoyment. He had murdered his capacity for
happiness, and dug his own spiritual grave while making preparations
for enjoying life. This young society man died of nothing to do and
dissipation, at thirty.

What a miserable farce the life of men and women seems to us! Time,
which is so precious that even the Creator will not give a second
moment until the first is gone, they throw away as though it were
water. Opportunities which angels covet they fling away as of no
consequence, and die failures, because they have "no chance in life."
Life, which seems so precious to us, they spurn as if but a bauble.
Scarcely a mortal returns to us who has not robbed himself of years of
precious life. Scarcely a man returns to us dropping off in genuine
old age, as autumn leaves drop in the forest.

Has life become so cheap that mortals thus throw it away