of the laws of chastity.
We will now devote the remaining pages of this chapter to the
consideration of some of the causes of the vice, the avenues that lead
to the awful sin which we are considering, and the terrible consequences
which attend it.

Bad Company.--The influence of evil companionship is one of the most
powerful agents for evil against which those who love purity and are
seeking to elevate and benefit their fellow-men have to contend. A bad
boy can do more harm in a community than can be counteracted by all
the clergymen, Sabbath-school teachers, tract-distributers, and other
Christian workers combined. An evil boy is a pest compared with which
the cholera, small-pox, and even the plague, are nothing. The damage
which would be done by a terrific hurricane sweeping with destructive
force through a thickly settled district is insignificant compared with
the evil work which may be accomplished by one vicious lad.

No community is free from these vipers, these agents of the arch-fiend.
Every school, no matter how select it may be, contains a greater or
less number of these young moral lepers. Often they pursue their work
unsuspected by the good and pure, who do not dream of the vileness pent
up in the young brains which have not yet learned the multiplication
table and scarcely learned to read. We have known instances in which
a boy of seven or eight years of age has implanted the venom of vice
in the hearts and minds of half a score of pure-minded lads within a
few days of his first association with them. This vice spreads like
wild-fire. It is more "catching" than the most contagious disease, and
more tenacious, when once implanted, than the leprosy.

Boys are easily influenced either for right or for wrong, but especially
for the wrong; hence it is the duty of parents to select good companions
for their children, and it is the duty of children to avoid bad company
as they would avoid carrion or the most loathsome object. A boy with
a match box in a powder magazine would be in no greater danger than
in the company of most of the lads who attend our public schools and
play upon the streets. It is astonishing how early children, especially
boys, will sometimes learn the hideous, shameless tricks of vice which
yearly lead thousands down to everlasting death. Often children begin
their course of sin while yet cradled in their mother's arms, thus early
taught by some vile nurse. Boys that fight and swear, that