n vitalized. Nor in their spirit and essence
should they be confined to those who accept supernaturally revealed
religion. They concern all ethical teachers, who must realize that it is
at puberty that they are called upon to inspire or to fortify the great
ideal aspirations which at this period tend spontaneously to arise in the
youth's or maiden's soul.[38]

The age of puberty, I have said, marks the period at which this new kind
of sexual initiation is called for. Before puberty, although the psychic
emotion of love frequently develops, as well as sometimes physical sexual
emotions that are mostly vague and diffused, definite and localized sexual
sensations are rare. For the normal boy or girl love is usually an
unspecialized emotion; it is in Guyau's words "a state in which the body
has but the smallest place." At the first rising of the sun of sex the
boy or girl sees, as Blake said he saw at sunrise, not a round yellow body
emerging above the horizon, or any other physical manifestation, but a
great company of singing angels. With the definite eruption of physical
sexual manifestation and desire, whether at puberty or later in
adolescence, a new turbulent disturbing influence appears. Against the
force of this influence, mere intellectual enlightenment, or even loving
maternal counsel--the agencies we have so far been concerned with--may be
powerless. In gaining control of it we must find our auxiliary in the fact
that puberty is the efflorescence not only of a new physical but a new
psychic force. The ideal world naturally unfolds itself to the boy or girl
at puberty. The magic of beauty, the instinct of modesty, the naturalness
of self-restraint, the idea of unselfish love, the meaning of duty, the
feeling for art and poetry, the craving for religious conceptions and
emotions--all these things awake spontaneously in the unspoiled boy or
girl at puberty. I say "unspoiled," for if these things have been thrust
on the child before puberty when they have yet no meaning for him--as is
unfortunately far too often done, more especially as regards religious
notions--then it is but too likely that he will fail to react properly at
that moment of his development when he would otherwise naturally respond
to them. Under natural conditions this is the period for spiritual
initiation. Now, and not before, is the time for the religious or ethical
teacher as the case may be--for all religions and ethical systems may
equally adap