When we contemplate all this may we not well pray, Oh, God forgive us our sins of ignorance and false modesty and help us rightly to appreciate this, one of Thy greatest gifts to the human race!
A Striking Illustration
Let me bring to you an illustration to make this thought clear. Suppose you could unsex every child in this city under six years of age; this would be before the sex nerve center had time to flood the life with the sense of beauty. Then build a wall about the city and leave these children to themselves, simply supplying them with food and clothing, but keeping away from them, as far as possible, all human beings, who through sex impulses were filled with thoughts of beauty. What would be the results and what kind of a city would you have here in forty years from now? There would be little, if any, physical beauty among these people as they grew up, for they would grow slatternly or slab-sided, or fat and stuffy, and having lost the sense of beauty with their unsexing they would let the buildings go to decay and the streets grow up to weeds, and what a dreary waste this once beautiful city would be!
Who Has Been Teaching the Children?
Though the thought is new to you, do you not begin to see the truth and beauty of what I have been saying about this wonderful nerve center, or brain of the physical life?
What father or mother who may read this has ever felt it a religious joy to teach their children the truth about this wonderful gift of God to the human race?
I am not going to ask you how many of you were so taught, for I feel very sure none of you were. Scarcely anyone has ever been taught any thing right about it, but most, if not all, have been left to stumble along in the dark, as you and I were, and if by chance they happened to hit upon a plan, or stumbled onto knowledge, which enabled them to live together happily after marriage, well and good; if not, the great American juggernaut, the divorce mill, makes another revolution, and a wrecked home and two broken lives are held up to public gaze, as the result of its deadly work. There is not the slightest doubt in the mind of the writer but that a large percent of the divorces of this country grow out of the absolute ignorance of young people as to how to live together happily.
Help!
But what shall I say? I do not know how to teach my children.
A most delightful book, which will put pure, noble, and instructive words into every parent’s mouth with which to approach their children from babyhood till they see them stand at the marriage altar, is “Four Epochs of Life,” by Elizabeth Hamilton-Muncie, M. D., Ph. M., Graves Publishing Co., New York. Let us ever remember that the education of a child along these lines should begin as suggested in this charming book, at a very early age, but it is better late than never, and if you have neglected your children before begin now.