earnest, private talks with the wisest and most experienced mothers and
teachers of our day; and it is in their name, far more than in my own,
that I ask you to ponder what I say.

Do not, however, be under any fear that I intend in these pages to make
myself the medium of all sorts of horrors. I intend to do no such thing.
It is but very little evil that you will need to know, and that not in
detail, in order to guard your own boys. We women, thank God, have to do
with the fountain of sweet waters, clear as crystal, that flow from the
throne of God; not with the sewer that flows from the foul imaginations
and actions of men. Our part is the inculcation of positive purity, not
the part of negative warning against vice. Nor need you fear that the
evil you must know, in order to fulfil your most sacred trust, will
sully you. This I say emphatically, that the evil which we have grappled
with to save one of our own dear ones does not sully. It is the evil
that we read about in novels and newspapers, for our own amusement; it
is the evil that we weakly give way to in our lives; above all, it is
the destroying evil that we have refused so much as to know of in our
absorbing care for our own alabaster skin--it is _that_ evil which
defiles the woman. But the evil that we have grappled with in a life and
death struggle to save a soul for whom Christ died does not sully: it
clothes from head to foot with the white robe, it crowns with the golden
crown. Though I have had to know what, thank God! no other woman may
ever again be called upon to know, I can yet speak of the great conflict
that involved this knowledge as being the one great purifying,
sanctifying influence of my life. But even if, as men would often
persuade us, the knowledge of the world's evil would sully us, I know I
utter the heart of every woman when I say that we choose the hand that
is sullied in saving our own dear ones from the deep mire that might
otherwise have swallowed them up, rather than the hand that has kept