directly on the evil, to give warnings against vice, or to speak on
things which your womanhood unspeakably shrinks from mentioning. What
you are called to do is to secure, so far as you can, that the mind and
soul moves on its own proper plane. It is more an attitude you have to
form than a warning you have to give. And here it is that the imperative
need of high positive teaching comes in. Till parents, and especially
mothers, recognize their God-given functions as the moral teachers of
their own children, till they cease to shunt off their responsibilities
on the professional shoulders of the schoolmaster, we had better frankly
give up the whole question in despair. Strange and sad it seems to me
that at the end of the nineteenth century after the coming of our Lord
I should have to plead that the moral law is possible under every
condition to any man, and that parents are _ipso facto_ the moral
teachers of their own children. And yet it is the denial, tacit or
explicit, of these two primary truths that has been the greatest
obstacle to the progress of my work.

But I appeal to you: Who but a mother can bring such a constant and
potent influence to bear as to secure the mind and character moving on
its own higher plane in relation to the whole of this side of our
nature? Who so well as a mother can teach the sacredness of the body as
the temple of the Eternal? Who else can implant in her son that habitual
reverence for womanhood which to a man is "as fountains of sweet water
in the bitter sea" of life? Who like a mother, as he grows to years of
sense and observation, and the curiosity is kindled, which is only a cry
for light and teaching, can so answer the cry and so teach as to make
the mysteries of life and truth to be for ever associated for him with
all the sacred associations of home and his own mother, and not with the
talk of the groom or the dirty-minded schoolboy? Who so well as a
mother, as he passes into dawning manhood, can plead faithfulness to the