sow the germ of moral death in the heart of youth. How helpless
and ignorant the young are in their seeming strength and smartness: how
self-sufficient in their unwisdom, how little amenable to reason, how
slow to perceive true ideals. What patient, persevering effort is
required to form character, and what a little thing will poison life in
its source! How easy it is to see and understand what is coarse and
evil, how difficult to appreciate what is pure and excellent. How
quickly a boy learns to find pleasure in what is animal or brutal; but
what infinite pains must be taken before he is won to the love of truth
and goodness. Caricature delights him, and he has no eyes for the chaste
beauty of perfect art. The story of an outlaw fills him with enthusiasm,
and the heroic struggles of godlike souls are for him meaningless. He
gazes with envious awe upon some vulgar rich man, and finds a
philosopher, or a saint, only queer. He studies because he has been sent
to school, where ignorance will expose him to ridicule and humiliation,
and possibly too, because he is told that knowledge will help him to win
money and influence. However great his proficiency, he is in truth but a
barbarian, without wisdom, without reverence, without gentleness. He has
been brought only in a vague way into communion with the conscious life
of the race; he has no true conception of the dignity of souls, no sense
of the beauty of modest and unselfish action. He mistakes rudeness for
strength, boastfulness for ability, disrespect for independence,
profanity for manliness, brutality for courage.

And to add to his misfortune, he is blind to his own weakness and
ignorance. A sneer or a jest is his reply to the voice of wisdom, as
with a light heart he walks in the road to ruin; and thus it happens
that for one who becomes a true and noble man, a hundred go astray or
sink into an unintelligent and vulgar kind of life. This fact is
concealed from the eyes of the young, from the eyes of the multitude,
indeed. As we hide the dead in the earth that we may quickly forget our
loss, so society buries from sight and thought those who fail. Their
number is so great that the oblivion which soon overwhelms them is
needful to save even the brave from discouragement. Of a hundred college
boys the lives of twenty-five will be ruined by dissipation, by sensual
indulgence; twenty-five others will be wrecked by unhappy marriages,
foolish financial schemes, dishonesty a