me a moral impossibility
for him ever to lower or degrade a woman in his after-life.

In concluding these suggestions there is one point I must emphasize, the
more so as in treating of one particular moral problem it is difficult
not to seem to ignore a truth which is simply vital to all moral
training. Let us clearly recognize that there is no such thing as moral
specialism. Our moral being, like Wordsworth's cloud, "moveth altogether
if it move at all." You cannot strengthen one particular virtue except
by strengthening the character all round. Cardinal Newman points out--I
think in one of those wonderful Oxford sermons of his--that what our
ancestors would have called "a bosom sin" will often take an underground
course and come to the surface at quite an unexpected point in the
character. Hidden licentiousness, which one would expect to evince
itself in over-ripe sentiment and feeling, manifests itself instead in
cruelty and hardness of heart. The little habit of self-indulgence which
you in your foolish fondness have allowed in that boy of yours may, in
after-life, come out as the very impurity which you have endeavored so
earnestly to guard him against. This mystical interdependence and hidden
correlation of our moral and intellectual being is a solemn thought, and
can only be met by recognizing that the walls of the citadel must be
strengthened at all points in order to resist the foe at one.
Truthfulness, conscientiousness that refuses to scamp work, devotion to
duty, temperance in food and drink, rectitude--these things are the
bastions of purity of life, as well as of all high character.

But in these days I think we have more especially to remember that the
Beautiful Gate of all noble living rests, like the gate of the Jewish
Temple, on two pillars, both of which show signs of being considerably
out of repair. One of these pillars is obedience, or discipline. If you
have not exacted prompt and unhesitating obedience in your boy, from his
earliest childhood, to the parents whom he has seen, do you think that
in after years he will obey the Father of Lights, whom he has not seen?
Do you think, if you have let him set your authority at defiance, he
will in future years, with temptation on one side and opportunity on the
other, bow to the invisible authority of conscience? What is it, I ask,
that makes the army the finest school for character, giving us our
Lawrences, our Havelocks, our Gordons, our Kitcheners, bu