There are things to be said to children; and there are things to be said to older boys and girls going out into the world. I cannot fix the right ages for it: no two children are alike. I feel, also, that first-rate school teachers are more likely than second-rate parents to say the right thing to children. There is a place, doubtless, in school teaching, for lessons in botany and in natural history. The trouble is, that some of the children may fail to see what you are driving at. You can lead them to the very edge of the stream of analogy, but you cannot make them drink. They may remain, at the last moment, recalcitrant; and you may never get quite so far as to tell them what you were intending to tell them.
If it were my duty to inform a boy, between 12 and 14 years old—and it certainly is not the business of any man to speak to girls about their bodily nature—I would not begin with botany. I would begin with mankind. I would tell him that all of us come out of the bodies of our mothers: and in that way come all creatures. I would argue from us to animals, not from animals to us. Then I would say something about the anatomical differences between male and female children: and I would tell him that this difference runs through all creation, all the distance from us down to plants and flowers. And I would say to him, “All creatures are formed in this way, in the bodies of their mothers, before they are born: but they cannot begin to be formed, till the male and the female have actually come together: and that is all that you need to know.” If it were my duty to talk to a young man 18 or 19 years old, I would talk to him as to any other man, freely and explicitly; I would also warn him of the disastrous bodily results which may follow even one act of wrong-doing, and how these results might be visited, years hence, on his children. And, of course, whatever the age, I would not only lecture, I would also preach. If I am to help a boy to “keep straight,” I must appeal from that which is natural in him to that which is spiritual in him.
And—so far as adolescence is concerned—if ever there was a time when we ought to speak plainly, it is now. Whether we like it or not, the old habit of silence has for some years been falling away from us. Even before the War, we had begun to talk more freely, and to be less offended by plain speaking. The War has made it still harder for us to remain silent. We have seen, everywhere, boys and girls, all of a sudden, as it were transfigured: the boys turned into men, the girls turned into women; courage, obedience, endurance, flaming up in them, so that we marvel at them. But we have seen, also, the dark side of their life. They have gone ahead so fast, and their eyes are so dazzled, that some of them will not stop to read our danger-signals. Most of us have some influence over them, some of us have great influence. Things already are bad enough, and, in all probability, will be worse in the near future. Our influence was not given to us for nothing: and if we do not exercise it now, we shall be sorry, too late.
There is one more bit of advice, in these days, which we might give to young men. The War seems to make it somehow wrong, that a young man, of decent character, in good health and steady work, should remain unmarried. He ought to marry, that sons of his may serve their country, filling the empty places of the young men who have died for their country. Before the War, it was nobody’s business but his own, whether a young man were married or single. We observe him now from another point of view, with every added month of the War, and every casualty-list; we say that he is not doing his duty, if he prefers the comfort and the freedom of bachelor-life to the cares of marriage and parentage. Let him so live now, in these terrible days, that his children shall be born healthy, a blessing alike to him and to his country.
Now, to finish with, let me dot the i’s and cross the t’s of this paper. It is likely enough that I have been talking more of things as they were in my boyhood than of things as they are now. The Victorian Age was in many ways magnificent; but it neither approved of inquisitive children, nor enlightened them. For example—one of my contemporaries tells me that she was taught botany out of a book called Lindley’s Ladies’ Botany. In this book, the fact that flowers are male and female was carefully left out. She learned this fact when she was 18; she gathered it from a sermon in church, and it vexed and offended her. We have got past all that sort of nonsense. But we are still at sixes and sevens how to tell children about their bodily nature. We let them alone, they let us alone; we wait, they wait; neither we nor they like to begin. We do not know what they are thinking of. But we know this much, that there are two sets of thoughts which must, simply must, be growing up together in their minds—the idea of sex, and the idea of God. We cannot help them without self-preparation; we muddle them, not educate them, on these two subjects, unless we have made up our own minds how we will answer their questions.
Further, I do believe that some parents might well make a solemn little home-ceremony of telling a child about his or her bodily nature; not leave it to chance, nor to the unclean talk of schoolfellows; no, nor even leave it to the child’s teachers. Father or mother ought to do it. And, when the children are grown up, it ought to be done again, with clear warning against the dangers which they are going into.
Finally, what they need is not physiology alone, but physiology and faith together. There has been a great deal too much science talked about adolescence. Too much physiology, pathology, psychology—not that psychology really is a science—too much analysis, too many statistics. If any of you, as parents or as teachers, do require a short science-book, there is Dr. Starr’s The Adolescent Period. It has its faults. It is unduly apprehensive of some things which are not important. It makes too much of those boys and girls who are abnormal. Some children are abnormal; and some, but very few, are as it were demoniac, to their own misery and the misery of others. These most unhappy children have been put under the microscope for us by our kind friends the psychologists. But the vast majority of boys and girls are normal.
Dr. Starr’s book is not for general reading. Still, for the right sort of readers, it is a good and useful book. But what, after all, do we want with books? It is the children that we have got to read; not books about them, but them. I doubt whether psychologists understand ordinary children better than a wise old family nurse understands them. Boys and girls are human beings: they were not discovered by science: they refuse to be elucidated by science. The way for us to help them is not by psychology, but by faith, self-preparation, courage, and common sense.
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