ps impossible. It robs all of life's
intercourse of its freshness and its joyous innocence. It sullies all
beauty. It does these things chiefly because it separates men from God
and His vision. The best and holiest is barred to the stained man.
Impurity makes it impossible for him to appreciate what is pure and
fine, dulls his finer perceptions, and he is not given the place where
only pure and fine things are.

[Illustration: Helen Keller]

There can be no such thing as an impure gentleman. The two words
contradict each other. A gentleman must be pure. He need not have
fine clothes. He may have had few advantages. But he must be pure and
clean. And, if he have all outward grace and gift and be inwardly
unclean, though he may call himself a gentleman, he is a liar and a lie.

O, young man, guard your heart-purity! Keep innocency! Never lose it;
if it be gone, you have lost from the casket the most precious gift of
God. The first purity of imagination, of thought, and of feeling, if
soiled, can be cleansed by no fuller's soap. If a harp be broken, art
may repair it; if a light be quenched, the flame may kindle it; but if
a flower be crushed, what art can repair it? If an odor be wafted
away, who can collect or bring it back?

Parents are, in many cases, responsible for the impurity of their
children. Through a mistaken sense of delicacy, they allow the
awakened, searching mind of the child to get information concerning its
physical nature from the mind of some boy or girl no better taught than
itself, and so conceive wholly wrong and harmful ideas concerning
things of which it is vitally important that every human being should
at the outset of life have clear and adequate ideas. Such silence,
many times, is fatal, and always foolish, if not criminal.

"I have noticed," says William Acton, "that all patients who have
confessed to me that they have practised vice, lamented that they were
not, when children, made aware of its consequences; and I have been
pressed over and over again to urge on parents, guardians,
schoolmasters, and others interested in the education of youth, the
necessity of giving to their charges some warning, some intimation, of
their danger. To parents and guardians I offer my earnest advice that
they should, by hearty sympathy and frank explanation, aid their
charges in maintaining pure lives." What stronger breastplate than a
heart untainted?

A prominent writer says: "If yo