scious association, their results
are identical. In the following pages, therefore, I shall refer to
them jointly as impurity.

The earliest evil which springs from impurity is the destruction of
the intimacy which has hitherto existed between the boy and his
parents. Closely associated with this is that duplicity of life which
results from secrets which may be shared with the coarse but must be
jealously concealed from everyone who is respected. Untold harm
follows these changes in a lad. Hitherto he has had nothing to conceal
from his mother--unless, indeed, his parents have been foolish enough
to drive him into deception by undue severity over childish mistakes,
and accidents, and moral lapses. Every matter which has occupied his
thoughts he has freely shared with those who can best lead him into
the path of moral health.

Henceforth all is changed. The lad has his own inner life which he
must completely screen from the kind eyes which have hitherto been his
spiritual lights. Concealment is soon found to be an easy thing. Acts
and words are things of which others may take cognisance; the inner
life no one can ever know. A world is opened to the lad in which the
restraints of adult opinion are not felt at all and the guidance and
inspiration of a father's or mother's love never come. How completely
this is the case in regard to impurity the reader will hardly doubt if
he remembers that all parents believe their boys to be innocent, and
that some 90 per cent. of them are hopelessly hoodwinked. But this
double life is not long confined to the subject of purity. The
concealment which serves one purpose excellently can be made to serve
another; and henceforth parents and adult friends need never know
anything but what they are told. It is a sad day for the mother when
first she realises that the old frankness has gone; it is a very, very
much sadder day for the boy. There is no fibre of his moral being but
is, or will be, injured by this divorce of home influences and by this
ever-accumulating burden of guilty memories. "His mother may not know
why this is so," writes Canon Lyttelton; "the only thing she may be
perfectly certain of is that the loss will never be quite made up as
long as life shall last."

Another injury done by impurity to the growing mind of the lad is
that, in all matters relating to sex, he learns to look merely for
personal enjoyment. In every other department of life he is moved by
a variety of m