y with
their things that they give them away, are pointed out to him as
generous, and where boys who are so bored with their own minds that they
prefer other people's, are considered modest. If he knew in the days
when models are being pointed out to him, that the time would soon come
in the world for boys like these when it would make little difference
either to the boys themselves, or to any one else, whether they were
generous or modest or not, it would make his education happier. In the
meantime, in his disgrace, he does not guess what a good example to
models he is. Very few other people guess it.

The general truth, that when a man has nothing to be generous with, and
nothing to be modest about, even his virtues are superfluous, is
realised by society at large in a pleasant helpless fashion in its
bearing on the man, but its bearing on the next man, on education, on
the problem of human development, is almost totally overlooked.

The youth who grasps at everything in sight to have his experience with
it, who cares more for the thing than he does for the person it comes
from, and more for his experience with the thing than he does for the
thing, is by no means an inspiring spectacle while this process is going
on, and he is naturally in perpetual disgrace, but in proportion as they
are wise, our best educators are aware that in all probability this same
youth will wield more spiritual power in the world, and do more good in
it, than nine or ten pleasantly smoothed and adjustable persons. His
boy-faults are his man-virtues wrongside out.

There are very few lives of powerful men in modern times that do not
illustrate this. The men who do not believe it--who do not approve of
illustrating it, have illustrated it the most--devoted their lives to
it. It would be hard to find a man of any special importance in modern
biography who has not been indebted to the sins of his youth. "It is the
things I ought not to have done--see page 93, 179, 321," says the
average autobiography, "which have been the making of me." "They were
all good things for me to do (see page 526, 632, 720), but I did not
think so when I did them. Neither did any one else." "Studying
Shakespeare and the theatre in the theological seminary, and taking
walks instead of examinations in college," says the biography of Beecher
(between the lines), "meant definite moral degeneration to me. I did
habitually what I could not justify at the time, either to my