human nature which must ere long be known, and are part of
God's appointment? Does not every dictate of humanity and of reason
point to the conclusion that the dawn of this knowledge should be
invested with all that is tender, and loving, and pure, and sacred,
instead of being shrouded in the mists of innuendo or blazoned
forth in the shamelessness of bestiality? There is really no
answer but one to such a question, and the plain truth is that
fathers, perhaps still more mothers, must recognize the duty which
lies upon them to teach their children, at such times, in such
words, and with such reservations as the character of each child
may suggest, the elements at least of that knowledge which will
otherwise be learnt but a very little later from a widely different
set of instructors. I lay down the principle as admitting of no
exception--I do not anticipate even one dissentient voice from any
who now hear me--_that no boy ought ever to be allowed to go to
school without learning from his father or his mother, or from some
brother or tried friend considerably older than himself the simple
facts as to the laws of birth and the terrible danger of ever
coming to talk of these phenomena as matters of frivolous and
filthy conversation_."

I can only beseech you to give due weight to these words of one who had
many years' experience of a large public school. Over and over again, at
all my meetings of educated mothers, I have reiterated his question in
similar words, "Is it right, is it fair, that your boy should learn the
sacred mysteries of life and birth from the sources which Dr. Butler
enumerates, and to which you abandon him, if you refuse to speak;
sources of unclean and lying information by which I have no hesitation
in saying that the mind and conscience of many men are more or less
permanently defiled, even when the life has been kept outwardly pure?"
Can you hesitate for one moment to allow that the springs of the life
which you will be the first to acknowledge comes from God should well up
from a pure source, till, like Wordsworth's stream--

"Crowned with flowers,
The mountain infant to the sun laughs forth,"

and that the whole subject should be so bound up in the boy's mind with
his father's love for his mother, his mother's love for his father, with
his own existence, and that of his sisters,