Percival, John, 1834-1918 / 2008-09-23 00:00:00


Deterioration is the inseparable shadow of every form of ignoble life.
"Our acts our angels are, for good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk with us still."
Leave your faculties unused and they become blunted and dulled; leave
your higher tastes uncultivated and they die; let your affections feed on
anything unworthy and they become debased.
To those who do this it may happen that whilst, so far as years go, they
are still in all the freshness of youth, they are already dying that
death to all higher capacity which is worse than any decay of our
physical organism. Such an early death of higher tastes and faculties,
and of hope for the future, is sometimes effected even before schooldays
are over. And the mere possibility of such a fate overhanging any of us
should stir us like a trumpet-call to take care that we do not surrender
our life to any mean influence, and that we are very zealous for all that
concerns the safety of the young.
"I send out my child," I can imagine the parent of any one of you having
said, "to be trained for manhood; I send him to his school that his
intellect may be cultivated, his moral purpose made strong, and that all
good and pure tastes may be fostered in him; but it is dreadful to think
that instead of this he may, by his life and companionship there, be
hardened and debased, or even brutalised; he may become dead to the
higher life even before he becomes a man.
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