pretend that it alone deals with manliness and reality, and he complains
that it is always difficult to convince youth that the higher planes of
life contain anything but chilly sentiments
An educator has lately pointed out that it is an old lure of vice to
pretend that it alone deals with manliness and reality, and he complains
that it is always difficult to convince youth that the higher planes of
life contain anything but chilly sentiments. He contends that young
people are therefore prone to receive moralizing and admonitions with
polite attention, but when it comes to action, they carefully observe
the life about them in order to conduct themselves in such wise as to be
part of the really desirable world inhabited by men of affairs. Owing to
this attitude, many young people living in our cities at the present
moment have failed to apprehend the admonitions of religion and have
never responded to its inner control. It is as if the impact of the
world had stunned their spiritual natures, and as if this had occurred
at the very time that a most dangerous experiment is being tried. The
public gaieties formerly allowed in Catholic countries where young
people were restrained by the confessional, are now permitted in cities
where this restraint is altogether unknown to thousands of young people,
and only faintly and traditionally operative upon thousands of others.
The puritanical history of American cities assumes that these gaieties
are forbidden, and that the streets are sober and decorous for
conscientious young men and women who need no external protection. This
ungrounded assumption, united to the fact that no adult has the
confidence of these young people, who are constantly subjected to a
multitude of imaginative impressions, is almost certain to result
disastrously.
?feed=comments rss2 title=Comments RSS 2.0 Feed
