cription of certain other mental influences
necessary for the child. A very important point is that we should use
our utmost endeavours to divert the child from the sexual impulse. The
more the awakening of this impulse threatens to force itself upon the
child's attention, the more necessary is it to bring into play the
measured activity of other faculties and interests. We think here as
much of methods of aesthetic culture, reading, and the theatre, as of
bodily sports and games. At the same time, it must be our aim to
cultivate the general strength of the will, since this is needed alike
for the control of the sexual impulse, and for the overcoming of other
temptations and passions. The general moral education of the child, the
formation of its character, and the encouragement of a pursuit of ideal
aims, are all also of the greatest possible importance in relation to
sexual education. Nothing is better adapted to ensure personal happiness
and a high moral standard, than the inculcation of idealism, which must
on no account be confused with aloofness from the everyday affairs of
the world.

By many persons, an especial stress is laid upon the value of religious
education, for the purpose of directing in proper paths the sexual life
of the child, and of giving help in the mastery of its temptations. But
notwithstanding the fact that I value most highly a _genuinely_
religious education, I feel that for the purposes just mentioned we
cannot place much reliance upon _that which in our schools of to-day
passes by the name of religious education_. I have been personally
acquainted with too many persons brought up on "strictly religious"
lines, adherents of the most diverse creeds, but chiefly Protestants,
Catholics, and Jews, whose religious education has been of remarkably
little use to them in this respect. Among children, I have known some
who masturbated immoderately, and yet their progress in their religious
studies was extraordinary. I have known of serious epidemics of
masturbation, in some cases of mutual masturbation, in boarding-schools
in which the day's work was always begun with prayers and hymns. Quite
recently, another case has been reported to me, of a so-called exemplary
school, where the educational methods had a strong religious trend, and
yet seduction to mutual masturbation played a great part. In spite of
these experiences, I do not dispute the fact that even in association
with the modern methods of r