"which knows all, but loves us better than it
knows." You can press your child against the very heart of God, and lay
him in the Everlasting Arms, that faint not, neither are weary; and,
with the mother of St. Augustine, you may know that the child of such
prayers and such tears will never perish.

"Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall
He shall not blind his soul with clay."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: This is the case with our recognized medical manuals; I do
not know whether it is equally true of American manuals.]

[Footnote 9: Vol. ii. See chapter on "The Position of Women."]

[Footnote 10: _Sartor Resartus_, by Thomas Carlyle, Book II., chap, ii.,
p. 68. Chapman and Hall, 1831.]

CHAPTER VI

BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL LIFE

I now come to what must always be the great moral crux in a boy's life,
that on which all the higher issues of his character will, in all human
probability, turn--his school life. One of our great educators took
what, looked at superficially, seemed the somewhat retrograde step of
giving up the mastership of a college at Oxford to take again the
head-mastership of a great public school. But in a conversation I had
with him he led me to infer that he had done so from the conviction
forced upon him that the whole moral trend of the character must be
given, if given at all, prior to university life, at the public school;
and to him nothing less than the formation of high moral character
seemed worth striving for. Fine scholarship and high mathematics are
excellent, but after all, as the apostle of culture, Matthew Arnold, has
told us, conduct, and not intellectual attainment, forms seven-tenths of
life.

Now, it is in connection with your boy's school life that you will have
your greatest dangers to face, your hardest battle to fight.

I am, of course, aware that your school system is in some respects
different from ours. You have the mixed day school such as largely
obtains in Scotland, but which does not exist, at least for the upper
classes, in England. You have private boarding-schools, which with us
are called preparatory schools, as they form the vestibule to the public
school. And you have, lastly, a few large public schools somewhat on the
model of Eton and Harrow.

Let us begin with the boarding-school. I do not intend for o