will naturally lead on to instruction about human beings. Even if such
contact with nature should be impossible, life in any place and in any
guise will assuredly present you with opportunities for your teaching.
And in any case try to get in _first_. Before the slime of schoolboy
talk or the follies of schoolgirl talk have defiled the
subject tell your children about it, as about something sacred and
beautiful--much too sacred and beautiful for the chatter of idle hours
in playgrounds, etc. You will be surprised, if you have forgotten your
own childhood, how early it is necessary to do all this if you are to
get in first. No general rules about the right age can be laid down.
Children differ enormously in regard to the ages at which they pass
from stage to stage in their development. You will need to watch and to
understand. Above all do not let your telling take the form of mere
prohibitions. Do not let it stand related in the first case to warnings
against sins. You do not want to associate the idea of sin in the first
case with this subject at all. What you can do is to implant a certain
reverence in a child's mind in relation to the whole matter, and if you
succeed in that you will have forearmed your child against sin. I long
to know that children are learning about sex not in association with
scoldings, reproofs, and warnings, but rather as part of the splendid
truth of God. It is the association of the facts of sex with the sins
of men and women that has spoilt this part of life for most minds. Of
course it is only kind to tell boys and girls where it is that they may
go wrong--it _is_ necessary to put them on their guard. But that
should be a secondary matter--a mere addition to your teaching.

My own experience as a minister has brought to my knowledge several
very pathetic instances of how young girls get into very serious
trouble just through lack of the knowledge their mothers ought to have
given them. It seems possible still for a girl even of seventeen or