efore he is fifteen. It is
rather interesting to notice that those periods when his experiences are
likely to be very deep and very strong, are the years when his chest girth
is expanding the most rapidly. A very good bit of physiology or psychology
or of anything else you choose to call it, to learn is this:

If you want to convert a man to religion, get plenty of good, fresh air
into his body; you never can do it in an ill-ventilated room.

It is a period of seeing visions and of dreaming dreams; you know that, if
you remember your boyhood and girlhood. Those dreams and visions are the
most substantial things there are in his life or in yours or mine; for
"where there is no vision the people perish." Wendell Phillips used to say
that "the power which overthrew slavery and hurled it to the ground was
young men and young women dreaming dreams by patriots' graves." There is a
good deal more than rhetoric in that statement. Endless possibilities are
in these dreams and visions. It is a period of promise, of magnificent
promise, which you and I as teachers are privileged to see afar off before
they are even glimpsed by his parents and many of his friends.

The great question now is, Will the promise and the vision ever be
realized, or will they fade out and disappear and leave him a Philistine?
And lucky if he is not a brute, for the only brute in this world, my
friends, is a degenerate man. When you hear a man say that he has cut his
eye-teeth, and he has got rid of his dreams and his visions, then may the
Lord have mercy on the soul of that man, because he is dead. The
all-important question now is, Can you get that dream and that vision so
burned into his memory, so blazing before his eyes, that he will never
forget it and never lose sight of it, and win it if it costs him his life?
Then you have educated him.

These visions are far more important than all of the science, even the
biology, that a man can learn in college. It is the business of the parent
and teacher at this time to bring to birth and to sturdy growth high aims,
purposes, ideals, the whole spiritual life. Your business in early
childhood is with the physical, because that is the important thing at that
time, if you can build a very healthy little animal, you have done well;
but during the high school age you must build the spiritual. If you don't
feel this, I cannot explain it to you; and if you don't feel this within
you, if it is all meaningless and