The Boys | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 12, 1885

The Boys.

“You can’t keep boys quite straight, you know. They must have a chance to sow their wild oats.” Must? A word from Satan’s vocabulary! Look ahead a few years. There he goes—your boy—swearing, swaggering, coarse, obscene! You hope he will marry and sober down! Yes, if some pure girl will pour the fullness of her sweet life into the turbid stream of his, there is a bare chance that he may be saved. How much better to have trained him to the right, when you had him under your hands! In the outset, he was not unlike his sister in morals. You held her to the proprieties and decencies, while you let him run at his own will in paths of misdeed. Now, in purity of life, they are leagues apart. There are as many boys as there are girls in the infant class of our Sunday-schools, but not one-half as many boys as girls in the Bible-classes. Women outnumber men in the church two to one. In the State prison men outnumber women fifty to one. This sad proportion tells its own story.—Gospel Teacher.