Impurity in Schools by F. B. Meyer

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 24, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 46.

Impurity in Schools

By F. B. Meyer

By Rev. F. B. Meyer

On board an Atlantic liner I once had the opportunity of a considerable amount of conference with a Roman Catholic priest, who was deeply interested in the cause of education, and had heard the confessions of thousands of boys and youths. He gave it as his opinion that nine out of ten were more or less addicted to impurity.

The president of the Royal College of Surgeons, in a lecture delivered in 1885, which was finally accepted by a committee of public schoolmasters, and published by the White Cross League, computed that eighty per cent of boys at boarding-schools were tainted with impure practices. The White Cross secretary, says Miss Ellice Hopkins, to whom I am deeply indebted for this and other suggestions, states that the lecturer was asked whether he could not modify the statement; but after consultation with other medical authorities, he said that if he altered it at all he must make it still more positive. In a letter from Sir William Gowers we have this terrible sentence: “You are quite right about the subject; I should say eighty per cent—higher in private schools.” Dr. Dukes, the head physician to one of our largest public schools, says that the reason of this wide-spread evil is that in the immense majority of cases a boy leaves his home without one word of warning from his parents, that he will meet with bad boys who will tell him that everybody does as they do, and thus he falls into evil ways from his innocence and ignorance alone.

May not a boy go further, and argue that since his father must have known that such things would be suggested to him, but did not warn him that they were wrong, he must have expected that he would fall in with the general custom which he would find in vogue? Surely, the boy will say to himself, if my father took so much care to warn me against lying, swearing, drink, and debt, but said nothing to me about these things, it must be because he knew that I should of course do as the rest. This, at least, we agree with Dr. Dukes in thinking, would be a very fair inference.

How far all this may be true of girls, I am not of course able to say; but I have been told that the days have greatly altered for the worse. Cheap and bad novels have wrought sad havoc in myriads of young lives, polluting and vitiating their hearts, their imaginations, and their physical organization. In other cases, sheer ignorance of the most elementary facts has laid young girls open to nameless temptations. They have been entrapped and ruined through their absolute want of understanding; for “surely in vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird.”—National Purity Association.