tell them what I do not believe, I hanker sometimes after the old
prohibitions and penalties. Physiological penalties are too remote,
and the subtler penalties--the degradation, the growth of callousness
to finer pleasures, the loss of sensitiveness to all that is most nobly
attractive in woman--are too feeble to withstand temptation when it
lies in ambush like a garrotter, and has the reason stunned in a
moment.

The only thing that can be done is to make the conscience of a boy
generally tender, so that he shrinks instinctively from the monstrous
injustice of contributing for the sake of his own pleasure to the ruin
of another. As soon as manhood dawns, he must also have his attention
absorbed on some object which will divert his thoughts intellectually
or ideally; and by slight yet constant pressure, exercised not by fits
and starts, but day after day, directly and indirectly, his father must
form an antipathy in him to brutish, selfish sensuality. Above all,
there must be no toying with passion, and no books permitted, without
condemnation and warning, which are not of a heroic turn. When the boy
becomes a man he may read Byron without danger. To a youth he is
fatal.

Before leaving this subject I may observe, that parents greatly err by
not telling their children a good many things which they ought to know.
Had I been taught when I was young a few facts about myself, which I
only learned accidentally long afterwards, a good deal of misery might
have been spared me.

Nothing particular happened to me till I was about fourteen, when I was
told it was time I became converted. Conversion, amongst the
Independents and other Puritan sects, is supposed to be a kind of