strong to love, and yet so weak to save—­can lead his faltering childish feet to that Love which is deeper than our deepest fall, “which knows all, but loves us better than it knows.”  You can press your child against the very heart of God, and lay him in the Everlasting Arms, that faint not, neither are weary; and, with the mother of St. Augustine, you may know that the child of such prayers and such tears will never perish.

                              “Happy he
    With such a mother! faith in womankind
    Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
    Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall
    He shall not blind his soul with clay.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 8:  This is the case with our recognized medical manuals; I do not know whether it is equally true of American manuals.]

[Footnote 9:  Vol. ii.  See chapter on “The Position of Women.”]

[Footnote 10:  Sartor Resartus, by Thomas Carlyle, Book II., chap, ii., p. 68.  Chapman and Hall, 1831.]

CHAPTER VI

BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL LIFE

I now come to what must always be the great moral crux in a boy’s life, that on which all the higher issues of his character will, in all human probability, turn—­his school life.  One of our great educators took what, looked at superficially, seemed the somewhat retrograde step of giving up the mastership of a college at Oxford to take again the head-mastership of a great public school.  But in a conversation I had with him he led me to infer that he had done so from the conviction forced upon him that the whole moral trend of the character must be given, if given at all, prior to university life, at the public school; and to him nothing less than the formation of high moral character seemed worth striving for.  Fine scholarship and high mathematics are excellent, but after all, as the apostle of culture, Matthew Arnold, has told us, conduct, and not intellectual attainment, forms seven-tenths of life.

Now, it is in connection with your boy’s school life that you will have your greatest dangers to face, your hardest battle to fight.

I am, of course, aware that your school system is in some respects different from ours.  You have the mixed day school such as largely obtains in Scotland, but which does not exist, at least for the upper classes, in England.  You have private boarding-schools, which with us are called preparatory schools, as they form the vestibule to the public school.  And you have, lastly, a few large public schools somewhat on the model of Eton and Harrow.