the roof and crown of
things,"--Man, as you have already explained the physical facts of
life-giving on the plane of plants, and ants, and bees, where they can
excite no feeling of any kind, you will have no need to go over them
again, but will find yourself free to express the physical in terms of
the moral. Man, as a spiritual being, incarnate in an animal body, takes
this great law of sex which we have seen running through the animated
creation, and lifts it into the moral and the spiritual. The physical
love which in animals only lasts for the brief time that is needed for
the production and rearing of offspring--becomes in him a love which
"inhabiteth eternity," and unites him to the mother of his children in
the indissoluble union of marriage. His fatherhood becomes the very
representative of the Father in heaven. The mother becomes the very type
and image of the Love that has loved us with more than a mother's love,
borne with us with more than a mother's patience, suffered for us, in
the Cross and Passion, more than a mother's pangs, to bring us into a
higher life. The love of brothers and sisters becomes the first faint
beginning of the universal Church and the brotherhood of man; and the
sweet babble of their voices grows choral at length in the songs of the
Church triumphant, the unbroken family in heaven; while the Christian
home shadows forth the eternal home which awaits us hereafter.[21]

The only warning you would have to give your boy would be to point out
that, as a cathedral takes longer to build than a shanty, so the human
body, which is meant to be the temple of the "Lord and Giver of life,"
takes much longer to mature than an animal's. Many an animal lives and
dies of old age in the fourteen years that leave man still an immature
boy. And you must earnestly impress upon him that the whole of this part
of his nature which you have been explaining to him as a great law
running through animated creation and finding its highest uses in Man,
must be left to mature itself in absolute rest and quiet. All premature
use of it is fatal to perfect health of soul and body. The less he
thinks of it, and the more he thinks of his work and his athletics, the
better for him. Above all, you hope, now that he knows the truth and his
curiosity is satisfied, he will loathe all filthy jests and stories
about that which is the source of all beautiful living things on the
pleasant earth and, in his own little world, of al