It is of vital importance to realize how small at present is the formative influence of the individual home and of the weekly discourse of the preacher, compared with the mighty social influences which spread with corrupting force around the great bulk of our youth. We find, as a matter of fact, that complete moral confusion too often meets the young man at the outset of life. Society presents him with no fixed standard of right or wrong in relation to sex, no clear ideal to be held steadily before him and striven for. Religious teaching points in one direction, but practical life points in quite a different way. The youth who has grown up from childhood under the guardianship of really wise parents, in a true home, with all its ennobling influences, and has been strengthened by enlightened religious instruction, has gradually grown towards the natural human type. He may have met the evils of life as they came to him from boyhood onwards, first of all with the blindness of innocence, which does not realize evil, and then with the repulsion of virtue, which is clear-sighted to the hideous results of vice. Such a one will either pass with healthy strength through life, or he may prove himself the grandest of heroes if beset with tremendous temptations; or, again, he may fall, after long and terrible struggles with his early virtue. But in the vast majority of cases the early training through innocence into virtue is wanting. Evil influences are at work unknown to or disregarded by the family, and a gradual process of moral and physical deterioration in the natural growth of sex corrupts the very young. In by far the larger ranks of life, before the lad has grown into the young man, his notions of right and wrong are too often obscured. He retains a vague notion that virtue is right, but as he perceives that his friends, his relations, his widening circle of acquaintance, live according to a different standard, his idea of virtue recedes into a vague abstraction, and he begins to think that vice is also right--in a certain way! He is too young to understand consequences, to realize the fearful chain of events in the ever-widening influence of evil acts--results which, if clearly seen, would frighten the innocent mind by the hideousness of evil, and make the first step towards it a crime. No one ventures to lift up a warning voice. The parent dares not, or knows not how to enter upon this subject of vital importance. There are no safeguards to his natural modesty; there is no wise help to strengthen his innocence into virtue.