What ought to have been kept on a higher plane of being will be used to stimulate functions just coming into existence, and pre-eminently needing to be let alone on their own plane to mature quietly and unconsciously.

Thus dwelt upon and stimulated, these functions become in a measure disordered and a source of miserable temptation and difficulty, even if no actual wrong-doing results.

If you only knew what those struggles are, if you only knew what miserable chains are forged in utter helpless ignorance, you would not let any sense of difficulty or shrinking timidity make you refuse to give your boy the higher teaching which would have saved him.
It is told of the beautiful Countess of Dufferin, by her son and biographer, Lord Dufferin, that when the surgeons were consulting round her bedside which they should save--the mother or the child--she exclaimed, "Oh, never mind me; save my baby!" If you knew the facts as I know them, I am quite sure you would exclaim, in the face of any difficulties, any natural shrinking on your part, "Oh, never mind me, let me save my boys!" FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 5: _The Study of Sociology_, by Herbert Spencer (International Scientific Series), p.

270, fifth edition, 1876.] [Footnote 6: I quote here at some length from a White Cross paper called _Per Augusta ad Augusta_, in which I summarized and applied Dr.
Martineau's teaching, as I do not think I can do it more clearly or in more condensed form.

By some mistake it came out, not under my name, but under the initials of the writer of _True Manliness_ and several others of the White Cross Series.