The boy's companions are important. Emerson says, "You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him."[52] Books which contain high ideals of manhood and also of womanhood are obviously helpful, as are also dramas of this character. And finally those general principles of moral and religious education must be used, without which we can have no strong foundation for clean living. If we have failed to give proper instruction previous to adolescence, we now have a golden opportunity (and in thousands of cases, our last opportunity) to save the adolescent to a life of purity. As a rule, he has ideas of sex life which are, at least, unwholesome. Curiosity is at a high pitch, and passion is likely to be strong. Nevertheless, the ambitions and ideals of a boy at adolescence are high. He will fight to be clean if he understands that clean living means the acquisition of strength. He would rather have virility than anything else in the world. As to method, let us deal with the boy as a creature with reason. The best plan is to place before boys a standard of virile manhood, and then to show how such a standard may be met by clean living. Real characters who have achieved high standards of vigor should be shown as heroes worthy of imitation. Lincoln is known by most adolescent boys to have been a man of great physical strength. He was "a man without vices, even in his youth, but full even in ripe age of the sap of virility."[53] The effect of clean living upon nations may also be spoken of. Charles Kingsley writes of the Teuton:[54]-- It was not the mere muscle of the Teuton which enabled him to crush the decrepit and debauched slave nations.... It had given him more, that purity of his: it had given him, as it may give you, gentlemen, a calm and steady brain, and a free and loyal heart; the energy which comes from self-restraint; and the spirit which shrinks from neither God nor man, and feels it light to die for wife and child, for people and for Queen. Because thousands of our boys are now growing into manhood who will never receive the advantages of such a plan as we hope will be worked out during the next decade,--boys who are now at the danger point,--an emergency exists that must be met in the best way possible. For these boys, we are now forced to give single talks or short series of talks. Just what facts should be mentioned in a talk to any particular group of boys is a matter which must always be governed by the age, development, and environment of the boys concerned.