er of helping to
guard him from it. Keep him from the knowledge of evil, and the
temptations that come with that knowledge, you cannot. The few first
days at school will insure that, to say nothing of the miserable streets
of our large towns. As Thackeray long ago said in a well-known passage,
much animadverted on at the time:

"And by the way, ye tender mothers and sober fathers of Christian
families, a prodigious thing that theory of life is, as orally
learnt at a great public school. Why! if you could hear those boys
of fourteen who blush before their mothers, and sneak off in
silence in the presence of their daughters, talking among each
other, it would be the woman's turn to blush then. Before Pen was
twelve years old, and while his mother thought him an angel of
candour, little Pen had heard enough to make him quite awfully wise
upon certain points; and so, madam, has your pretty rosy-cheeked
son who is coming home from school for the ensuing Christmas
holidays. I don't say that the boy is lost, or that the innocence
has left him which he had 'from heaven, which is our home,' but
that the shades of the prison house are closing very fast round
him, and that we are helping as much as possible to corrupt
him."[2]

But though you cannot keep him from the knowledge of evil, you can be a
potent factor in teaching him the hidden dangers that beset him, in
seeing that his young feet rest on the rock of true knowledge, and not
on the shifting quagmire of the devil's lies; but above all, in
inspiring him with a high ideal of conduct, which will make him shrink
from everything low and foul as he would from card-sharping or sneaking,
proving yourself thus to him as far as in you lies--

"A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light."

The boy thus mothered is saved as a rule from all physical risk.

And this in part anticipates my second point. You cannot let this
question alone if you are to aim at the highest for your boy. High
character is more to be accounted of than long life. And it is to you,
as a woman, that the guarding of the higher springs of his nature is
especially entrusted. My whole experience has gone to teach me, with
ever-increasing force, that the proposition that purity is vitally
necessary for the woman, but of comparativ