ling reports of immorality in
high schools, based, as is commonly claimed, upon ignorance, then the
time has certainly come for plain speech, and the boys and girls should
be gathered together in separate companies for instruction in sex
hygiene and morality. Any education which makes no deliberate attempt to
conserve human happiness and social welfare in this important respect is
inadequate and culpable. The testimony that comes from juvenile courts,
girls' rescue homes, and boys' reformatories constitutes a grave
indictment of society for its neglect to impart proper information.

It is part of the minister's task to work for a better day in this as in
every phase of moral achievement. Next to the physician he best knows
the mental and physical suffering, the moral defeat, and the awful
injustice to women and children whom the libertine pollutes with
incurable diseases. If he is a true pastor, he will strive to keep the
boys pure through expert instruction to parents, through personal
advice, through wholesome activity and recreation, through courses on
sexual hygiene in the public schools, through war on indecency in
billboard, dance, and theater, through absolute chastity of speech, and,
in general, through an ideal of life and service which shall lift the
boys' ambitions out of the low and unhealthy levels of sense
gratification. To put the spiritual nature in control is his high and
sacred opportunity.

The importance of the minister's part in this struggle for the body and
soul of youth is based upon the fact that in this critical encounter
there is no aid that is comparable with religion. Thousands of honest,
serious-minded men frankly confess that in modern conditions they see
little hope of this battle being won without religion as a sanction of
right conduct. The boy needs God, a God to whom he can pray in the hour
of temptation. He needs to regard his life with all its powers as God's
investment, which he must not squander or pervert.

Here, as everywhere else in boy-life, the loyalty appeal, which, as
nothing else, will keep him true to mother and father, to society, and
to God, stands the religious leader in good stead. Upon honor he will
not violate the confidence of his parents, and the trust imposed in him
by his Maker. Upon honor he will deport himself toward the opposite sex
as he would wish other boys to regard his own sister; and the religious
teacher has it within his power, if he will keep in to