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Page 22
"He will say to himself: 'My father knows of all this vice at
schools, and yet has not said one word to me about it. He has
warned me about most things. He told me to be truthful, to keep my
temper, to be upright and manly, to say my prayers; he pressed me
never to get into debt, never to drink, and never to use bad
language; and he told me I ought to change my boots and clothes
when wet, so as not to get ill; and yet he has not said one
syllable about this. My father is a good man and loves me, and if
he wanted me not to do this he would surely have told me; it can't
be very wrong, else I am sure he would have protected me and told
me all about it."
I remember a friend of mine, who had been greatly stirred on the whole
subject, endeavoring, with tears in her eyes, to persuade a father to
warn his boy before sending him to his first public school, and on his
absolutely refusing to do any such thing, she said to him, "At least
promise me that you will give him this book," placing in his hands Mr.
George Everett's excellent little book, _Your Innings_. This he
consented to do. The next morning my friend met him at breakfast, the
boy having been already despatched by an early train. "Well," he said,
"I sat up till past twelve last night reading your book; it is
excellent, and I gave it to my lad before starting him off. But there
is just one chapter in it, called a 'Strange Companion,' which I took
the precaution of previously cutting out with my penknife; and my boy in
his after years will thank me for not putting any such ideas in his
head, but having kept him the pure and innocent lad that he is." I need
not say that it was the one chapter that would have put the boy on his
guard. Oh, befooled and purblind father! I happened to know that the
school to which the boy was sent was swept at that time by a moral
epidemic, and before that hapless lad had been a week in its corrupt
atmosphere he would have had ideas put into his head with a vengeance.
His father had handed over the ground of his boy's heart for the devil
to sow the first crop, and as a rule the devil sows, not wild oats, as
we say, but acorns--a dread sowing which it may take years to root up
and to extirpate, even if, so far as after-taint is concerned, it can
ever be wholly extirpated.
In another case a widowed mother came to one of my meetings, and was
profoundly alarmed at what I said about the dangers of our schoolboys.
It had never occurred to her that her gentlemanly little lad of twelve
could have any temptations of the kind. Unlike the father I have
mentioned, she resolved to speak to him that same evening. She found
that he was fighting a battle against the whole school, standing up
alone for the right, guided by some blind instinct of purity to resist
the foul suggestions which were inflicted upon him, threatening him
with the most terrible consequences in after-life if he did not yield
and do as the other boys did. Think of it, ye mothers! a child of twelve
without a hand to guide him, without a voice to cheer him, refused the
knowledge that would have saved him from his deadly peril, his own
mother deaf and dumb and blind to his struggles, leaving him to fight
his little forlorn hope absolutely alone. I need scarcely say how
thankfully he poured forth his sore heart to his mother when once she
had opened the door, till now kept locked by her own ignorance; and how
she was able to explain to him that, far from reaping any evil
consequences from doing what is right, like Sir Galahad, "his strength
would be the strength of ten" if he kept himself pure. She probably took
steps to remove him from so corrupt an atmosphere as prevailed in that
preparatory school, but of this I do not know.
But here let me guard myself from being misunderstood. I am not making
out that every schoolboy is exposed to these temptations; there are boys
so exceptionally endowed that they seem to spread a pure atmosphere
around them which is respected by even the coarsest and loosest boys in
the school. All I do maintain, with Dr. Butler, is that no school is
safe from this danger, that at any time it may prove an active one in
your boy's life, and that at the very least you have to guard him from
impure knowledge being thrust upon him before nature has developed the
instincts of manhood by which she guards her inner shrine.
And now I come to the question of day schools. As I have already said, I
cannot feel but they are more consonant with the order of our life as
giving the discipline and competition of numbers without removing the
boy from family life, nor do they lend themselves to some of the graver
evils of our boarding-schools. But, alas! in themselves they form no
panacea for the evils we are contemplating. On the contrary, I am told
on authority I cannot question that in some places this plague spot is
rife among them. In one case the evil had struck so wide and deep that
the school had to be temporarily closed. Here, again, the same lesson is
emphasized, viz.: that whatever is the form of the school, however
excellent the teacher, there is no substitute in the moral life for the
home teaching and training of mothers and fathers.
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