Over and over again, at all my meetings of educated mothers, I have reiterated his question in similar words, "Is it right, is it fair, that your boy should learn the sacred mysteries of life and birth from the sources which Dr.Butler enumerates, and to which you abandon him, if you refuse to speak; sources of unclean and lying information by which I have no hesitation in saying that the mind and conscience of many men are more or less permanently defiled, even when the life has been kept outwardly pure ?" Can you hesitate for one moment to allow that the springs of the life which you will be the first to acknowledge comes from God should well up from a pure source, till, like Wordsworth's stream-- "Crowned with flowers, The mountain infant to the sun laughs forth," and that the whole subject should be so bound up in the boy's mind with his father's love for his mother, his mother's love for his father, with his own existence, and that of his sisters, that he would shrink with utter loathing from the filthy so-called "secrets" that are bandied about among schoolboys?
I know that the task of conveying this knowledge presents many difficulties, but again I ask, "What is there in our life that is worth doing which is not difficult ?" Long ago the definition of a difficulty to me has become "a thing to be overcome." It is not in sitting down helplessly before a difficulty that the way will open.

With us, as with the Israelites on the brink of that raging midnight sea, it is in a brave obedience to the Divine command, "Go forward!" that the path opens through the trackless sea, and we find that the great waters that seem ready to overwhelm us are in reality a baptism into new life.
III Again I seem almost to hear the cry of your heart, "I know I ought to speak to my boy, but how am I to do it ?" Now, it is here that I earnestly desire to give you, if I possibly can, some helpful, practical suggestions, for I feel that it is not in the recognition of a duty, but in its performance, that the difficulty lies which is arresting so many educated mothers at the present time.
With very young children, whether girls or boys, there should be no difficulty whatever.

They are too young to understand.

Only, when they come to you asking their innocent little questions as to where the little baby brother or sister comes from, I would earnestly ask you never to allow yourself, or your nurse, to inflict on them the usual popular fables, that the baby was brought by the doctor or that it was found under the gooseberry-bush.

A child is far quicker than we think to detect that mother is hiding something, and the first tiny seed of evil curiosity is sown.