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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 Page 1 from 5: [1] 2 3 4 5 Forward |