But surely this needs only to be mentioned to be remedied. You do not make your boys happier during their holidays by making them selfish: what is really a novelty to a schoolboy, fresh from the association with boys only, is to have sisters to look after and a mother to depend upon him for all sorts of little services. A joyous exclamation on your part, "Oh, what a comfort it is to have a boy in the house to do things for one!" will make him swell with manly pride; and should he show the least tendency to put upon his sisters and make them fetch and carry for him, as they are only too willing to do, you can easily put a stop to that by a few caustic remarks that you don't want savages in your house; and a pointed use of that delightful story in one of the White Cross papers,[25] of the Zulu chief to whom the Government sent a propitiatory present of wagons and wheelbarrows, thinking that it would be sure to please him. But he gazed on them with fine scorn, exclaiming: "What's the use of those things for carrying our burdens when we have plenty of women!" Or you can use that equally good story, told by Sir John Lubbock at a sectional meeting of the British Association for the Promotion of Science, of a remote tribe of savages who had never seen a bullock, and when the white man arrived with his bullock wagons, after much perplexed discussion, they came to the conclusion that, as they were used for heavy loads, they must be the white man's wives!
A little wholesome, if incisive, raillery on your part will quickly extinguish any tendency to make willing slaves of his sisters. If, however, you prefer to indulge your foolish fondness for him, that subtle self-indulgence which makes it easier for you to sacrifice yourself and his sisters to him rather than discipline him to work out his true nature, remember you gratify yourself at his most cruel cost. You produce the boy whose youth is marked by a tacit contempt for girls and whose manhood will be disfigured by a light estimation of the beauty and sanctity of womanhood.
I know well I shall be told that all this is quite out of date; that modern girls are so independent that they stand in no need of brothers, but like to place themselves on a level with them and share as good comrades in all their rough-and-tumble games. Let us be of good cheer. Sex is a very ancient institution, the slow evolution of hundreds of centuries, and is in no danger of being obliterated by the fashion of a day. Take the most advanced "new woman"; yes, concealed under that virile shirt-front, unchoked by that manly necktie and turned-up collar, lurking beneath that masculine billy-cock; nay, hidden somewhere deeper down than the pockets of even those male knickerbockers, you will find the involuntary pleasurable thrill at a strong man's chivalrous attention, the delicious sense of a man's care and protection, which centuries and centuries of physical weakness have woven into the very tissues of her being, in however loud and strident a voice she may deny it. Whatever changes in the position of women may take place, the basic fact remains, and will always remain, the man is stronger than the woman, and his strength is given him to serve the weaker; and you have got to get your girls to be your fellow-helpers in developing all that is best and most chivalrous in their brothers, and not so to run riot in their independence as to substitute a boyish camaraderie for the exquisite relations of the true man to the true woman.
There rises up now before me a boy, one of those delightful English boys overflowing with pluck and spirits. His mother had come to one of my meetings, and, like so many other mothers, I am thankful to say, had received a lifelong impression from what I said with regard to the training of boys, and she resolved, there and then, to act upon my advice with her own boys. She told me some two years after, that this boy had come in late one afternoon and explained to her that a little girl had asked him to direct her to rather an out-of-the-way house. "I thought she might ask that question of some one who would tell her wrong, or that she might come to some harm, so I thought I had better go with her and see her safe to the house." "But what of the cricket-match that you wanted so to see?" his mother asked. "Oh, I had to give that up. There wasn't time for both."
On another occasion, when a Christmas-tree was being prepared in the schoolroom for some choristers, as he and his mother left at dusk a chorister tried to force himself past her and gain a private view; and when she refused him admittance, not recognizing who she was, called her a very disrespectful name. Instantly the boy flew at him like a little tiger, "How dare you speak to my mother like that!" "I didn't see it was your mother," the chorister pleaded, trying to ward off the blows. "But you saw it was a woman, and somebody's mother, and you dare to speak to her like that!" And such a storm of fisticuffs fell on every part of that hulking young chorister's person as forced him at last to cry for mercy and promise that he would never do so again. That boy's master wrote to his mother towards the end of his school-time—he was a Bluecoat boy—and said that he positively dreaded his leaving, as his influence on the side of everything good, and pure, and high was quite that of a master.
And now I come to the question of religious teaching, which you may be surprised that I have not put first of all. First of all, in one sense, I do put it. There can be no greater safeguard to purity of life than vital religion. I do not go so far as some evangelical mothers who have told me that nothing less than the conversion of their boys would be of the least avail to keep them morally straight; on the contrary, I have known men who have never come under any strong religious influence, but have grown up sceptical scientific men, yet who have led lives as pure as any woman's. Common manhood, with the "Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world"; common love for mother and sister, which for their sakes maketh it impossible to wrong their womanhood, even when fallen into the dust; common self-respect, which is so strong in some men, and makes them shrink from anything in the nature of mud, is often sufficient to accomplish this end. But still, when all is said, if in answer to your mother's prayers you can implant in your boy a sense of the Divine Presence and the cry of the quickened conscience, "How can I do this great sin and wickedness against God?" you have doubtless given him the best panoply against the fiery darts of temptation. Only I would again warn you that there must be no forcing of the religious emotions, no effort to gather the fruits of the spirit before the root, in the shape of the great cardinal virtues everywhere presupposed in Christian ethics, has been nourished, and strengthened, and watered into strong, healthy growth. We have to bear in mind our Lord's words, which it seems to me religious parents sometimes forget, that there is an order of growth in spiritual things as in natural—first the blade, then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear; and we are not to try to force the full corn in the ear before the stalk and the blade have grown. For the want of laying to heart these words of the great Teacher, I have known much pulpy, emotional religion engrafted on young souls—admirably adapted to exhaust the soil, but with the smallest possible bearing upon right conduct; a religion perfectly at its ease with much scamping of lessons and hard work in general; indulgent of occasional cribbing, and of skilful manipulation of awkward truth, of betting and small extravagances; and innocent of all sense of dishonesty in allowing a struggling parent to pay large sums for education while the school-time so purchased, often at the cost of home comforts and pleasant outings, is squandered in idleness.
What a boy really needs, and, indeed, all immature things—for I found it equally true of immature men—is a simple, practical religion, based more on the facts of life and conscience than on doctrines and dogmas. To know God as his Father; to know that he has a Redeemer who laid down His life to save him from sin and who takes account of his smallest and most broken effort to do what is right; to realize that it is only so far as he is like Christ and in Christ that he can be really a man and work out what is highest in him; to know that he has been baptized into a Divine Society, binding him to fight against all wrong, both within and in the world without; above all, to know that there is a supreme spiritual Power within him and about him to enable him to do right, and that in the line of duty "I can't" is a lie in the lips that repeat, "I believe in the Holy Ghost"; this is as much as his young soul can assimilate, not as mere religious phrases, but as realities to live by.
"So nigh to glory is our dust,
So nigh to God is man,
When duty whispers low 'Thou must,'
The soul replies, 'I can.'"
But see that beneath all this he has the special Christian teaching with regard to the sanctity of the body thoroughly instilled into him. If the Incarnation means anything, it means not the salvation and sanctification of a ghost, but the salvation and consecration of the whole man, of his body as well as his soul. True, the animal body to a spiritual being must always be a "body of humiliation," but nothing can be more unfortunate and misleading than the epithet in the Authorized Version of "vile" as a translation of the Greek word used by St. Paul. On the contrary, we are taught that even this mortal body is a temple of the Holy Ghost.
In teaching this there can be no difficulty; you can make use of a child's natural reverence for a church. You can say, "What would you think if you heard of some loose lads breaking into a church, and just for the fun of the thing strewing the aisles with cinder dust and all sorts of loose rubbish; tearing out the pages of Bibles and hymn-books to light their pipes, and getting drunk out of the chalice? You would be honestly shocked at such profanity. Nay, even in the dire exigencies of war we do not think better of the Germans for having stabled their horses in one of the French churches and left their broken beer-bottles on the high altar and the refuse of a stable strewn up and down the nave. Yet a church is, after all, only a poor earthly building, built by human hands. But there is one temple which God has built for Himself, the temple of man's body; and of that the terrible words are written, and ever fulfilled, "If any man defile that temple, him will God destroy." God's great gift of speech is not to be defiled by dirty talk, by profane language, by lies, or evil speaking. The organs which are given us for its sustenance are not to be denied by gluttony and piggishness, either in food or drink. The boy is not to use any part of his body in defiling ways which he would be ashamed for his own mother to know of. To do so is not only to defile, but—with the double meaning of the Greek word, which we cannot render into English—to destroy; to weaken his brain-power, which he wants for his work in life, to weaken his nervous system, lessening his strength thereby and rendering him less able to excel in athletics, and often, if carried to excess, in after-life bringing results which are the very embodiment of the terrible words, "Him will God destroy." The full force and bearing of this teaching he may not apprehend. I have already said that with a young boy the lower appeal never to do anything that is low and dirty and blackguardly will have far more practical weight, and will also avoid laying undue stress on the religious emotions. But I am quite sure that the Christian teaching of the sanctity of the body must be laid deep and strong with all the force of early impression in a boy's inmost being, in order that it may lie ready for future use when Nature has developed those instincts of manhood which will teach him its full significance.