To these approved antidotes, let me, as a doctor, add a good tonic, to steady the nerves of adolescence. I prescribe a full dose of the natural sciences. Some people believe in what are called “hobbies” for boys and girls. I do not think much of hobbies, if it comes to nothing more than photographing or stamp-collecting or carpentering at odd moments; but I love to see boys and girls working hard at physics and chemistry. It is a grand thing for them: it really does tranquillise and strengthen them; I like to believe that it even tends, as it were, to reduce their high temperature and their rapid pulse. All other employments of the adolescent mind――as Mrs. Tulliver, in _The Mill on the Floss_, says of the crowns of bonnets――they are “so chancy: never two summers alike.” Books, art, politics, amusements, outward observances of religion――all of them are so chancy: all of them are open to the criticism of the young people. I remember, ages ago, a German professor dining at my father’s house; and in the course of the talk some reference was made to St. Paul. “Ah! Paulus,” said the Professor, “I have read his works; but I do not agree with Paulus.” Science is not like that: there is no chanciness in her: we inevitably agree with her. If a chemical test goes wrong, we know that we have done it wrong. This eternal certainty gives to physics and chemistry, somehow, authority over the vagrant minds of boys and girls; and this authority, surely, must help to keep them able to resist temptation. These antidotes and this tonic are all very well; but the best thing of all would be, for all boys and girls, unfailing belief in what we call the Spirit of God, or the Presence of God, in their daily affairs. I feel sure that there are many of them who are more likely to be kept straight by that than by anything else. And, of course, it is our business to prepare them, with all the wisdom and forethought that we can manage to find in ourselves, for these dangerous years of early adult life. But we must begin while they are children; we must begin with careful answers to their ridiculous questions about sex and about God. These two ideas are our building-materials: we must work them together, not keep them apart, nor oppose them to each other; we must go on, constructing and reconstructing them in the growing fabric of the mind, adapting and adjusting them to each other: so that the children, when they come to adolescence, shall come to it neither ignorant nor helpless.