physical consequences which will follow if excess is persisted in.
Sometimes the two types of address are dovetailed into a single whole.
Neither are wholly satisfactory. The medical variety sometimes
terrifies a sensitive boy, who will imagine that his whole life is
ruined and all his chance of future happiness wrecked. He will become
somewhat morose, and not unfrequently will finally turn, in his
despair, to the very thing against which he has been warned. On the
other hand, and with another type of boy, it often fails equally
disastrously, because, judged by the medical standards to which it
appeals, it is proved by experience to be unsound. In his anxiety to
create a strong impression the schoolmaster will sometimes make
statements that are simply untrue. He will tell the boy that these
practices will ruin his cricket or his football. No doubt it sometimes
will; but it is more than likely that the boy knows several highly
successful athletes who are, as the boy knows, though the master may
not, complete adepts in schoolboy vice. Then there is the old threat,
possibly obsolete to-day, though one hesitates to say that anything is
obsolete in the conservative world with which we deal--the old threat
that half the inmates of the asylums of England have been brought there
by this practice. That, again, is simply untrue, and if the boy
happens to know it, the effect of such an untruth upon him may be very
bad. Equally unsuccessful, in the majority of cases, is the religious
talk. The unspeculative, dogmatic type of school religion does not
make an appeal to the ordinary boy sufficiently strong to override what
he has found to be the most fascinating thing in his experience. It is
too much a conventional decency imposed upon him from without, too
little a force within him which he has been helped to develop, such as
is alone powerful enough to contend with a desire itself arising
spontaneously from within. And when the sermon is accompanied by
exhortations to pray against temptation, it is sometimes not only
useless, but (again in the case of the ordinary boy) positively
harmful. For to get into the habit of praying against temptation means
to get into the habit of thinking about it, to become self-conscious,
and to succumb. Not but that there are some quite young boys who feel
Christ's nearness to them as Friend and Helper so vividly that they can
gain real strength from praying to Him. But we are talking of