The Physical Brain
Let us return now to this wonderful nerve center, or brain of the physical life. When does it begin to send out these finely attenuated beauty impulses, which must move at very high rates of vibration?
These impulses which give grace, form, and all other touches of indescribable charm to the body of the child.
From the very beginning of its life to some small degree, and from twelve years of age they begin to show themselves the dominant impulses of the life. They rise in the body just like waves of heat on a summer day. They are flooding every fiber of the being, giving roundness to the limbs, grace to the form, drawing beauty lines upon the face, painting roses in the cheeks, putting sparkles in the depths of liquid eyes. All of this and more are these little builders, which we call sex impulses, doing in the years from twelve to eighteen. Is it any wonder with all this marvelous work to do, that like the sculptor who is to make a statue out of a block of marble, they must take possession of the body and become the dominant element in it? The heart, liver, digestive organs, and even the brain itself are subject to these outflooding impulses as they work out the beauty of the physical life.
Turn back to your [chart] now and note what a small part the intellect plays in the life of the girl or boy between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Just enough to be a willing servant of the sex impulses, as they work out the plan of beauty, as given them by the hand of the Master of all life. In fact the brain is largely an automaton in this work, for the ego has not had time to fully lay through the brain that fine system of telephone connections and wires by which the brain becomes a perfect instrument through which the ego or inner man may reason out the problems of life, so that up to eighteen there is comparatively little reasoning ability in the life of children.
Impulses Moving at Rapid Rates of Vibration
These beauty building impulses are sent out in such abundance during the teens, that they fairly cause the body to scintillate, the cheeks to glow and the eyes to sparkle. Here they come, wave after wave, like shimmering light upon the mountains, trooping up through the physical life like angels of the Eternal, making the body glow with unspeakable beauty.
They should be guided by the finest and holiest thought, for they are the elect angels of God to the physical life of man. But what is done with them? Oh, sad! The parents have been led to think it is not quite the thing to talk to their children of these things and the child has not developed sufficient brain activity to reason about them and to understand them and translate them into elements of beauty and sacred service. Here the young life stands like a beautiful deer before the on-coming prairie fire, it feels the tremendous swish of the flood of feelings and physical life, like the hissing of the flames behind the deer. If only the deer can reach the lake for which he pants and swim out into its cool depths he will be safe; and if the child could creep, as it were, into the heart of father or mother and hear glorious, tender, holy words spoken of this flood of feelings, which is all so strange to it, and which sweeps up through its being like a storm in the forest, and have an intelligence translate them into God’s own beauty of life, what a joy it would be!
When I see the mighty army of beautiful youth standing unprotected and in ignorance of the great danger before them, with no one to teach them and the very parents that gave them being, indifferent, is it any wonder that my heart cries out, Oh, sad?