Impurity is the forfeiture of manliness. The true man must be untarnished. James went so far as to declare that this is just what religion is. "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this * * to keep himself unspotted from the world."
Every true man shrinks from uncleanness. He knows what it means. Impurity makes lofty friendships impossible. It robs all of life's intercourse of its freshness and its joyous innocence. It sullies all beauty. It does these things chiefly because it separates men from God and His vision. The best and holiest is barred to the stained man. Impurity makes it impossible for him to appreciate what is pure and fine, dulls his finer perceptions, and he is not given the place where only pure and fine things are.
Helen Keller
There can be no such thing as an impure gentleman. The two words contradict each other. A gentleman must be pure. He need not have fine clothes. He may have had few advantages. But he must be pure and clean. And, if he have all outward grace and gift and be inwardly unclean, though he may call himself a gentleman, he is a liar and a lie.
O, young man, guard your heart-purity! Keep innocency! Never lose it; if it be gone, you have lost from the casket the most precious gift of God. The first purity of imagination, of thought, and of feeling, if soiled, can be cleansed by no fuller's soap. If a harp be broken, art may repair it; if a light be quenched, the flame may kindle it; but if a flower be crushed, what art can repair it? If an odor be wafted away, who can collect or bring it back?
Parents are, in many cases, responsible for the impurity of their children. Through a mistaken sense of delicacy, they allow the awakened, searching mind of the child to get information concerning its physical nature from the mind of some boy or girl no better taught than itself, and so conceive wholly wrong and harmful ideas concerning things of which it is vitally important that every human being should at the outset of life have clear and adequate ideas. Such silence, many times, is fatal, and always foolish, if not criminal.
"I have noticed," says William Acton, "that all patients who have confessed to me that they have practised vice, lamented that they were not, when children, made aware of its consequences; and I have been pressed over and over again to urge on parents, guardians, schoolmasters, and others interested in the education of youth, the necessity of giving to their charges some warning, some intimation, of their danger. To parents and guardians I offer my earnest advice that they should, by hearty sympathy and frank explanation, aid their charges in maintaining pure lives." What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted?
A prominent writer says: "If young persons poison their bodies and corrupt their minds with vicious courses, no lapse of time, after a reform, is likely to restore them to physical soundness and the soul purity of their earlier days."