With reference to this point, who of us does not agree with the strictures of Acton upon the carelessness or prejudice which subjects a boy to unnecessary and too early temptations, sanctioning perhaps by parental advice his exposure to the wiliest and most dangerous of foes, his own unbridled imagination? Humphrey Clinker and Roderick Random are no longer to be found upon the family book-shelf. Griffith Gaunt, and the exciting issues of the modern French press, have taken their place. Lempriere, Ovid, and the other such meat for strong men, are put into the boy’s hands with an expurgated text. What lad, however, who has not been tempted to ransack his father’s library, and every other collection of books within his reach, in the hope of finding an original edition, just precisely as at a certain time of his youth, longer or shorter as this may have been, he has found himself turning to the coarsely translated and sometimes flagrant pages of the Old Testament, rather than to the chaste and ennobling language of the Gospels? “It has often surprised me,” writes Acton,[10] “that the filthy stories of the loves of the heathen mythology should have been so generally placed in the hands of lads. In such works the youth gloats over the pleasures which the heathen deities are supposed to have indulged in, while his imagination runs riot amid the most lascivious passages. The doctrine laid down in these volumes seems to be, that lust went on unchecked, that it was attended with no evil results, either physically or morally, to the individual, or to the society in which such scenes are supposed to have existed. To enable him to live as these gods of old are supposed to have done, with what companions must he not associate? He reads in them of the pleasures, nothing of the penalties, of sexual indulgence, and it is at a later period that the poor schoolboy is first to learn that sexual pleasure is not to be indulged in with impunity. He is not intuitively aware that, if the sexual desires are excited, it will require greater power of will to master them than falls to the lot of most lads; that if indulged in, the man will and must pay the penalty for the errors of the boy; that for one that escapes ten will suffer; that an awful risk attends abnormal substitutes for sexual intercourse; and that self-indulgence, long pursued, tends ultimately to early death or self-destruction.”