ligion as a helper of
mankind, by a frank attempt to bring the whole life to the dignifying
conception of a reasonable service to one's Maker?

Granting that such an attempt is desirable, we come face to face with
the necessity of imparting such information as will make the boy's way
of duty plain, and will elevate the subject to a place of purity and
religious worth. In this process of instruction, which is nothing less
than a sacred responsibility, the most common fault of the parent,
physician, teacher, and pastor is that of delay. By the time a boy is
eight years of age, he should have been informed as to his residence
within and his birth from his mother, and this in such a way as
wonderfully to deepen his love for her, and to beget in him a respect
for all women to the end of his life.

It is well that the mother should first inform him in that spirit of
utmost confidence which shall preclude his indiscriminate talk with
other people upon this subject. He should know, too, that further
information will be given as he needs it, and that he can trust his
parents to be frank and true with him in this as in everything else. By
all means let the mother tell the story and not some unfortunately
vicious or polluted companion. There are three reasons at least for
informing him thus early in life. One is that sufficient curiosity has
usually developed by this time, another is that the first information
should come from a pure source, and a third is that this instruction
should anticipate sex consciousness and the indecent language and
suggestions of school and street.

In the same spirit will the father impart to the boy a little later the
fact of the original residence within himself of the seed from which the
boy grew. By the father's reverent treatment of the subject in the hour
of a boy's confidence, and in response to his just curiosity, he may
hallow forever the boy's conception of the marriage relation and
emphasize the vast amount of tenderness and regard that is due every
mother. For the boy to feel sure that he has been told the truth by his
father, and to realize that his father regards these facts in an
honorable and clean way, will rob a thousand indecent stories of their
damage.

It belongs to the father to redeem the boy's idea of human procreation
from obscenity, and, under right conditions, to have this process
regarded by his boy as the most wonderful responsibility that falls to
man. Sometime before