The knowledge of these things awakens. Not that we are forced thereby to become virtuous; but that we see what power virtue and vice have, looking upon vice as any activity which eventually brings unhappiness to humanity. It is the emotional nature which is susceptible to the desire to experience new sensations; and it is the emotional nature that is the great nature. The great character is on the one side more daring than the average; and on the other more loving, more responsive, more alive, and therefore more likely to fall into the ditch. But the one who falls, and yet comes out again uninjured, and with wings free and pure, is a rare bird.

There is a temperament that finds it impossible to speak of such subjects, a temperament that would eagerly desire to warn youth, and to awaken the one who is blindly following a wrong path, but who finds it impossible to speak the necessary words. This reserve springs from a delicate and sensitive respect for human nature; it has been described by Mohammed as Hayya, "the quality of the truly religious", and it prefers to place the greatest trust and confidence in youth, and in friends. It is one that draws out and fosters virtue in others. How many young people owe their unstained records to the trust and confidence placed in them by the mother! At the same time education requires something more than a silent condemnation; it requires the clarification and understanding of that law of reciprocity which is the basic law of nature.

An artist relates how his father, whom he greatly respected, gave him no rules of conduct, but treated him always with trust and confidence; and how it was from his brother-in-law, the husband of his much older sister, that he received as a child a much needed warning. The brother-in-law, seeing the ardor, the generosity, the sociability, the enthusiasm for life of the youth, took him to various parts of the town, pointing out the different types of humanity; reminding him at the same time of the great traditions of his race and of his family, of the ideals of his fathers, of the beauty and pride of nobility. What he pointed out and what the youth saw with his own eyes left an undying impression on his mind of the effects of perverted life, influencing the whole trend of his life.

Youth is generous, youth is ardent, and rarely fails to respond.