The very signs, however, of Nature’s provision for raising the lower instinct into a human faculty, often create great uneasiness in the young mind. It is at this important crisis that the delicate and respectful counsel of the wise parent or physician is indispensable to both boys and girls. The youth should be told that Nature will help, not injure him at this important crisis of life, if he will be true to his own higher nature. The young of both sexes should realize that self-control of thought and action is essential. Every means of hygienic, intellectual, and religious influence should be used to direct and strengthen both mind and body. For both young men and young women it is hygiene in its largest sense that should be prescribed and enforced--viz., the guidance of the early vital forces, both physical and mental, into natural beneficial directions. The youth who has been saved from habits of self-abuse in childhood can now be saved from habits of vice in manhood, and helped forward in that life of virtue which alone will strengthen all his powers and make him worthy of marriage. That this view of the sexual function as a human force, to be governed by reason, is the truth, and the modern theory of its being a blind instinct enslaving the individual a falsehood, is proved in many ways. We have the medical opinion of physicians in large practice, the private and public testimony of individuals, the observation of well-managed schools and colleges, of prisons, of communities, and the social customs of various classes and different races. Let us glance at some of these facts. In rigid training for athletic sports, for boat-racing, prize-fighting, etc., chastity is enforced as one of the means for attaining the greatest possible amount of physical vigour and endurance. This fact, observed in ancient times, is confirmed by modern experience. When the health is seriously impaired, the same rule of sexual abstinence is laid down. In a large proportion of these cases the power of sex is not lost; the physical craving may even be increased, from the irritability which often accompanies disturbed health. But the fear of death acts as a counter force on the young mind, and rouses it to unwonted efforts at self-command. No sacrifice is too great to escape death, to regain health, and take part once more in ordinary life. Temptations are avoided, healthy regime adopted, and the young man, taking a great deal of outdoor exercise, leads for months an absolutely chaste life, with the greatest possible advantage to his health. Such cases may be constantly noted in foreign health resorts, and amongst a class of cases the most difficult to reform--viz., dissipated young men who have been perverted from childhood by a state of society so universally corrupt that it cannot happily be paralleled yet, in England or America.