words in
your hearing.

Keep marriage before you as a sacred goal, and as an incentive to put
out the best there is in you in order to reach it. Do more than this;
resolve that when you enter this covenant you will carry into it as
clean a conscience about the past as you expect her to have who gives
her happiness into your keeping. One sex can substantiate no claim to
licence, or even indulgence in this matter, that can be morally denied
to the other. There are events in life that are worth more than it
costs to meet them well; marriage is pre-eminently one of them, and you
can, if you elect to do so, enter it unspotted men.

Get control of your imagination. Be lord over your thoughts. You
cannot, as an old Puritan writer says, "prevent the birds from flying
over your head, but you can prevent them making their nests in your
hair." Which means that while you may not be able to prevent given
thoughts from darting into the mind, you can forbid their finding a
home there. The danger is not in what comes, but in what is permitted
to stay. You have some sense of the training that is needed in certain
parts of your nature; and if you join that training to the help of God,
you can not only cast evil cravings out of your life, you can do
something that is harder still--you can keep them out. Be careful
about companionships. Have no friendship with him who boasts of his
"amours," the "affairs of the heart," that he can sustain at the same
time. Shun, as you would a pestilence, the man of unclean speech. Let
it be a truth with you which must not be questioned, that the truest
indication of nobility of character is reverence for womanhood. By the
sweet and holy thoughts of your mother, by your sacred love and wishes
for your sister, I would remind you of words in which the "wisdom of
many buried ages lingers": "Keep innocence, keep purity, and do the
thing which is right, so shalt thou be brought at the last to thine end
in peace." May you watch and pray, that you yield not to temptation.
May you watch and pray, that you enter not eternity with that stain
upon the soul which no tears of your own can ever wash away, or time
blot out of the memory.

Another way in which we may defile this temple of the body is by the
habit of Betting. We usually speak of "betting and gambling," but the
latter term includes and covers transactions so wide in extent, and
complex in their nature, as to make it impossible for me in th