ng the low instincts in the
interest of high aims. He will point to those hidden naturalistic
realities as something not overimportant, but as something which a
clean boy and girl do not ask about and with which only the
imagination of bad companions is engaged. An instinctive indifference
and aversion to the contact with anything low and impure can easily be
developed in every healthy child amid clean surroundings. Why is the
boy to live and to die for the honour of his country? Why is he to
devote himself to the search for knowledge? Why is he to fight for the
growth of morality? Why does he not confine himself to mere seeking
for comfort and ease and satisfaction of the senses? All which really
creates civilization and human progress depends upon symbols and
belief. As soon as we make all those symbols of the historic
community, all the ideals of honour and devotion, righteousness and
beauty, glory and faithfulness, mere matters of scientific
calculation, they stare us in the face as sheer absurdities; and yet
we might again misname that as truth. Then it is the untruth which
makes us free, it is the non-scientific, humanistic aspect which
liberates us from the slavery of our low desires.

Certainly there will always be some wild boys and girls in the school
who try to spread filthy knowledge, but if the atmosphere is filled
with respect and reverence, and the minds are trained by inner
discipline and morality, the contagion of such mischievous talk will
reach only those children who have the disposition of the degenerate.
The majority will remain uncontaminated. Plenty of lewd literature in
the circulars of the quacks and even in the sensational newspapers
will reach their eye and their brain, and yet it will leave not the
slightest trace. The trained, clean mind develops a moral antitoxin
which at every pulse-beat of life destroys the poisonous toxins
produced by the germs which enter the system. The red lanterns will
never be entirely extinguished in any large city the world over, but
the boy who has developed a sense of respect and reverence and an
instinctive desire for moral cleanliness and a power to overcome
selfish impulses, will pass them by and forget them when he comes to
the next street corner. But the other, whose imagination has been
filled with a shameless truth and who receives as his protection
merely a warning which appeals to his fear of diseases, may pass that
red lantern entrance at first, but