present system of educating and bringing
up the boys and girls of our country, are too obvious to require minute
description. Irreligion and infidelity are progressing _pari passu_ with
the advance guards of immorality and crime, and all are _fostered_, if
_not engendered_, by the _materialistic system of school instruction_,
and the consequent wretched training at home and on the play-ground. The
entire absence of all religious instruction from the school-room is fast
bearing fruit in a generation of infidels, and we are becoming worse
even than the Pagans of old, who had at least their positive sciences of
philosophy, and their religion, such as it was, to oppose which was a
criminal offence. To those who would dispute this somewhat horrible
assertion, the author would point to the published statistics of church
attendance, from which it appears that of the entire population but a
very small proportion are habitual church-goers. Deducting from these,
again, those who attend church simply as a matter of fashion, or from
other than religious motives, and there remains a minimum almost too
small to be considered, abundantly sustaining our charge. The
disintegration of the prevalent forms of religious belief, the rapid
multiplication of sects, the increase in the ranks of intellectual
sceptics, the fashionable detractions from, and perversions of, the Holy
Scriptures, acting with the influences already mentioned, may well cause
alarm.

"But we have not only the removal of the salutary restraints of
religious influence from our popular system of education; we have the
promiscuous intermingling of the sexes in our Public Schools, which,
however much we may theorize to the contrary, is, to say the least,
subversive of that modest reserve and shyness which in all ages have
proved the true aegis of virtue. We are bound to accept human nature as
it is, and not as we would wish it to be, and both Christian and Pagan
philosophy agree in detecting therein certain very dangerous elements.
Among the most dangerous and inevitable is the sexual instinct, which,
implanted by the Creator for the wisest purposes, is, perhaps, the most
potent of all evils when not properly restrained, retarded, and
directed. This mysterious instinct develops earlier in proportion as the
eye and the imagination are soonest furnished the materials upon which
it thrives; and, long before the age of puberty, it is strong, and
well-nigh ungovernable, in those