about such matters, and knowledge of evil may spread rapidly from the older to the younger. In some schools, as is well known, there may grow up with deplorable facility an unhealthy interest in sexual matters. On the surface of school life all may seem fair enough, but beneath, hidden from all recognised authority, lies much that is unspeakable. If the boy has not been taught to have clean thoughts upon matters which are essentially clean, if he has not learned to know evil that he may avoid it, he may not escape great harm. The fault in us which kept him in ignorance will recoil upon our own heads. He will maintain the barrier which was erected in the first place by our own unhappy reticence, and we may find it a hard task to penetrate behind it and prevent his constant return to secret thoughts and imaginings or secret habits and practices. Certain physiological processes come to have for him an unclean flavour which is yet perniciously attractive. He knows little of the real meaning of sexual processes or of the great purpose for which they are designed. It is only that an unhealthy interest becomes attached to all subjects which are scrupulously avoided in general conversation. In secret he develops a wrong attitude to all these matters. Oliver Wendell Holmes[4] tells us that in religion certain words and ideas become "polarised," that is to say, charged with forces of powerful suggestion, and must be "depolarised." [Footnote 4: _The Professor at the Breakfast Table_, Oliver Wendell Holmes.] * * * * * "I don't know what you mean by 'depolarising' an idea, said the divinity-student. "I will tell you, I said. When a given symbol which represents a thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it undergoes a change like that which rest in a certain position gives to iron. It becomes magnetic in its relations--it is traversed by strange forces which did not belong to it. The word, and consequently the idea it represents, is polarised.