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Page 18
Now there is not a day that need pass without opportunities of training
your boys in this their true knightly attitude. You can see, as I have
already said, that they learn in relation to their own sisters what in
after years they have to practise towards all women alike. To give up
the comfortable easy-chair, the favorite book or toy, the warmest place
by the fire, to the little sister--this ought to become a second nature
to a well-trained boy. To carry a parcel for her, to jump up and fetch
anything she wants, to give in to her because he is a boy and the
stronger--all this ought to be a matter of course. As he grows older you
can place him in little positions of responsibility to his sisters,
sending them out on an expedition or to a party under his care. In a
thousand such ways you can see that your boy is not only born but grows
up a knight. I was once in a house where the master always brought up
the heavy evening water-cans and morning coal-scuttles for the maids.
And if these were placed at the foot of the stairs so as to involve no
running in and out of the kitchen, it might be no mean exercise for a
boy's muscles.
I was told only the other day of a little six-year-old boy whose mother
had brought him up from babyhood on these principles. He was playing
with his little sister on a bed, when suddenly he perceived that she
was getting perilously near the edge which was farthest from the wall.
Instantly he dismounted and went round to the other side, and, climbing
up, pushed her gently into the middle of the bed, remarking
sententiously to himself, "I think boys ought always to take the
dangerous side of their sisters." Ah me! if only you mothers would but
train your boys to "take the dangerous side of their sisters,"
especially of those poor little sisters who are thrust forth at so early
an age to earn their own living, alone and unprotected, on the perilous
highways of the world, skirted for them by so terrible a precipice, what
a different world would it be for us women, what a purer and better
world for your sons!
Surely the womanhood in our homes ought to enable us to bring up our
boys in such an habitual attitude of serving a woman, of caring for her,
of giving himself for her, that it would become a moral impossibility
for him ever to lower or degrade a woman in his after-life.
In concluding these suggestions there is one point I must emphasize, the
more so as in treating of one particular moral problem it is difficult
not to seem to ignore a truth which is simply vital to all moral
training. Let us clearly recognize that there is no such thing as moral
specialism. Our moral being, like Wordsworth's cloud, "moveth altogether
if it move at all." You cannot strengthen one particular virtue except
by strengthening the character all round. Cardinal Newman points out--I
think in one of those wonderful Oxford sermons of his--that what our
ancestors would have called "a bosom sin" will often take an underground
course and come to the surface at quite an unexpected point in the
character. Hidden licentiousness, which one would expect to evince
itself in over-ripe sentiment and feeling, manifests itself instead in
cruelty and hardness of heart. The little habit of self-indulgence which
you in your foolish fondness have allowed in that boy of yours may, in
after-life, come out as the very impurity which you have endeavored so
earnestly to guard him against. This mystical interdependence and hidden
correlation of our moral and intellectual being is a solemn thought, and
can only be met by recognizing that the walls of the citadel must be
strengthened at all points in order to resist the foe at one.
Truthfulness, conscientiousness that refuses to scamp work, devotion to
duty, temperance in food and drink, rectitude--these things are the
bastions of purity of life, as well as of all high character.
But in these days I think we have more especially to remember that the
Beautiful Gate of all noble living rests, like the gate of the Jewish
Temple, on two pillars, both of which show signs of being considerably
out of repair. One of these pillars is obedience, or discipline. If you
have not exacted prompt and unhesitating obedience in your boy, from his
earliest childhood, to the parents whom he has seen, do you think that
in after years he will obey the Father of Lights, whom he has not seen?
Do you think, if you have let him set your authority at defiance, he
will in future years, with temptation on one side and opportunity on the
other, bow to the invisible authority of conscience? What is it, I ask,
that makes the army the finest school for character, giving us our
Lawrences, our Havelocks, our Gordons, our Kitcheners, but simply this
habit of implicit obedience, of that discipline which has grown so
grievously lax in so many of our English homes? In Carlyle's strong
words, "Obedience is our universal duty and destiny, wherein whoso will
not bend must break: too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained
to know that 'would,' in this world of ours, is as mere zero to
'should,' and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to
'shall.'"[10]
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