The age of puberty, I have said, marks the period at which this new kind 

of sexual initiation is called for. Before puberty, although the psychic 

emotion of love frequently develops, as well as sometimes physical sexual 

emotions that are mostly vague and diffused, definite and localized sexual 

sensations are rare. For the normal boy or girl love is usually an 

unspecialized emotion; it is in Guyau's words "a state in which the body 

has but the smallest place." At the first rising of the sun of sex the 

boy or girl sees, as Blake said he saw at sunrise, not a round yellow body 

emerging above the horizon, or any other physical manifestation, but a 

great company of singing angels. With the definite eruption of physical 

sexual manifestation and desire, whether at puberty or later in 

adolescence, a new turbulent disturbing influence appears. Against the 

force of this influence, mere intellectual enlightenment, or even loving 

maternal counsel--the agencies we have so far been concerned with--may be 

powerless. In gaining control of it we must find our auxiliary in the fact 

that puberty is the efflorescence not only of a new physical but a new 

psychic force. The ideal world naturally unfolds itself to the boy or girl 

at puberty. The magic of beauty, the instinct of modesty, the naturalness 

of self-restraint, the idea of unselfish love, the meaning of duty, the 

feeling for art and poetry, the craving for religious conceptions and 

emotions--all these things awake spontaneously in the unspoiled boy or 

girl at puberty. I say "unspoiled," for if these things have been thrust 

on the child before puberty when they have yet no meaning for him--as is 

unfortunately far too often done, more especially as regards religious 

notions--then it is but too likely that he will fail to react properly at 

that moment of his development when he would otherwise naturally respond 

to them. Under natural conditions this is the period for spiritual 

initiation. Now, and not before, is the time for the religious or ethical 

teacher as the case may be--for all religions and ethical systems may 

equally adapt themselves to this task--to take the boy or girl in hand, 

not with any special and obtrusive reference to the sexual impulses but 

for the purpose of assisting the development and manifestation of this 

psychic puberty, of indirectly aiding the young soul to escape from sexual 

dangers by harnessing his chariot to a star that may help to save it from 

sticking fast in any miry ruts of the flesh. 

Such an initiation, it is important to remark, is more than an 

introduction to the sphere of religious sentiment. It is an initiation 

into manhood, it must involve a recognition of the masculine even more 

than of the feminine virtues. This has been well understood by the finest 

primitive races. They constantly give their boys and girls an initiation 

at puberty; it is an initiation that involves not merely education in the 

ordinary sense, but a stern discipline of the character, feats of 

endurance, the trial of character, the testing of the muscles of the soul 

as much as of the body. 

Ceremonies of initiation into manhood at puberty--involving 

physical and mental discipline, as well as instruction, lasting 

for weeks or months, and never identical for both sexes--are 

common among savages in all parts of the world. They nearly 

always involve the endurance of a certain amount of pain and 

hardship, a wise measure of training which the softness of 

civilization has too foolishly allowed to drop, for the ability 

to endure hardness is an essential condition of all real manhood. 

It is as a corrective to this tendency to flabbiness in modern