Lack of religious instruction.
But I speak from experience when I say that the course of study in Christian America is so arranged that a boy, from the grammar school upward till he graduates, is so fully pressed and overloaded with all other studies that there is no probability that he will find the time or the inclination for such (religious) investigations.
Educating boys for husbands.
In our days we have heard much said of the importance of training women to be wives. Is there not something to be said on the importance of training men to be husbands? Is the wide latitude of thought and reading and expression which has been accorded as a matter of course to the boy and the young man, the conventionally allowed familiarity with coarseness and indelicacy, a fair preparation to enable him to be the intimate companion of a pure woman? For how many ages has it been the doctrine that man and woman were to meet in marriage, the one crystal-pure, the other foul with the permitted garbage of all sorts of uncleansed literature and license?
If the man is to be the head of the woman, even as Christ is the head of the Church, should he not be her equal, at least, in purity?
Moral courage.
The pain-giving power is a most necessary part of a well-organized human being. Nobody can ever do anything without the courage to be disagreeable at times.