ing, I return to
my old position, that purity is an attitude of soul, or, perhaps I ought
to say, the "snowy bloom" of the soul's perfect health, rather than
anything you can embody in moral maxims or pure knowledge--that perfect
bloom of spiritual health which may be as much the result of a mother's
watchful care and training as the physical health of the body. It is for
you to train your boy in that knightly attitude of soul, that reverence
for womanhood, which is to men as "fountains of sweet water" in the
bitter sea of life; that chivalrous respect for the weak and the
unprotected which, next to faith in God, will be the best guard to all
the finer issues of his character. Truth of truth are the golden words
of Ruskin to young men:

"Whomsoever else you deceive, whomsoever else you injure,
whomsoever else you leave unaided, you must not deceive, nor
injure, nor leave unaided according to your power any woman
whatever, of whatever rank. Believe me, every virtue of the highest
phase of manly character begins and ends in this, in truth and
modesty before the face of all maidens, in truth and reverence or
truth and pity to all womanhood."

Can we doubt or question this, we who worship Him who came to reveal the
true man quite as much as to reveal the only true God--the real manhood
beneath the false, perishable man with which it is so often overlaid by
the influence of society and the world? Look at His attitude towards
women, ay, even Eastern women, who had not been ennobled by centuries of
Christian freedom and recognized equality of the sexes, but who, on the
contrary, belonged to a nation tainted to some degree with that Eastern
contempt for women which made a Hindu answer the question of the
Englishman, perplexed by the multiplied of Indian gods and sects, "Is
there _no_ point of belief in which you all unite?" "Oh, yes," the
Pundit replied, "we all believe in the sanctity of cows and the
depravity of women!"

These Eastern women, therefore, had much to enslave and lower them; but
see how instantly they rose to the touch of the true Man, just as they
will rise, the women of to-day, to the touch of the true manhood of your
sons, if you will train them to be to us such men as Jesus Christ was.
See how He made women His friends, and deigned to accept their ministry
to His human needs. Many severe rebukes are recorded from His lips to
men, but not one to a woman. It was a woman, ay