uidance from
the good, but were tempted and corrupted by the evil, we should have a
nation in which most men and women were drunkards, ready to break all
laws--human and divine--which stood in the way of an imperious need; a
nation in which, among those who declined to yield to iniquity, the
craving for drink caused unceasing and life-long struggle.

On the young man of to-day we lay a burden which no ordinary man was
ever yet able to bear. His boyhood and youth become, through
ignorance, the prey of lust; his passions become tyrannous; his will
is enslaved. Even if he contracts marriage, his troubles are not at an
end, for man, _as an animal_, is neither monogamous nor wholly
constant. His neglected sex-education makes him far more susceptible
to physical attractions than to those qualities which make a wife a
good companion, a good housekeeper, and a good mother; and but too
often, as a result, the beneficent influence of marriage is transient;
the domestic atmosphere ceases to be congenial; both husband and wife
become susceptible to other attachments, and the old struggle begins
all over again.

CHAPTER V.

SEX KNOWLEDGE IS COMPATIBLE WITH PERFECT REFINEMENT AND INNOCENCE.

The reader who has followed me through the preceding chapters will, I
hope, feel that, whatever objections there may be to giving explicit
instruction on sex matters to the young, such instruction is immensely
to be preferred to the almost inevitable perversion which follows
ignorance. If we had to choose between a state of "innocence" and a
state of reverent knowledge, many people would doubtless incline to
the former. No such option exists. Our choice lies between leaving a
lad to pick up information from vulgar and unclean minds, and giving
it ourselves in such a manner as to invest it from the first with
sacredness and dignity.

Even if the reader is still inclined to think that sex-knowledge is,
at best, an unholy secret, he will hardly doubt that it can be
divulged with less injury by an adult who is earnestly anxious for the
child's welfare than by coarse and irreverent lips.

I am not content to leave the reader in this dilemma. I am confident
that the following words of Canon Lyttelton spring from the truest
spiritual insight: "To a lover of nature, no less than to a convinced
Christian, the subject ought to wear an aspect not only negatively
innocent, but positively beautiful. It is a recurrent miracle, and yet
the very