Chastity

Of all the virtues of which the Christ left us the adorable example, none has been more unworthily forgotten by sad Humanity than chastity. And I speak not only of the chastity of the body, of which one would certainly still find numerous examples on Earth, but of that chastity of the soul, which has never conceived a thought, never let escape a word capable of staining the purity of the virgin or of the child who hears it.

The evil is so universal, the occasions of danger so multiplied, that parents, even those truly chaste in their acts and in their words, cannot escape the painful certainty that their children will not be able, do what they may, to withdraw themselves from the fatal contagion. It is necessary for them, however great the repugnance they may feel, to resign themselves to opening the eyes of those innocent creatures, at least to preserve them from physical danger, since it is absolutely impossible to preserve them from moral danger; and, often still, when they believed they had avoided the danger, there appears some reef, whose existence they had not suspected and upon which the poor and innocent child runs aground, the child whom their love could not preserve from the filth of vice. How many imprudent words, even in the most select society; how many images and descriptions, even in the most serious books, come, without the parents' knowledge, to awaken, excite, or even completely satisfy that avid curiosity, so fearsome, of the child who has not the least awareness of the danger! If the evil is difficult to avoid, even in the most enlightened classes of society, what to say of the inferior classes? And supposing that a child has had the good fortune to escape it under the paternal roof, how to protect it from that inevitable contact with the vices that oppress it daily?

Here is a very deep, very dangerous wound, of which every man who has kept moral sense at the bottom of his heart must feel the most imperious necessity to purge society. The evil is rooted in our hearts, and much time will yet flow before each of us has become pure enough even to suspect its gravity. Such a one would think he committed a serious fault if, before a child, he allowed himself the slightest ambiguous word; nevertheless, surrounded by mature persons, he will take pleasure in telling obscene or trivial jokes which, he says, do harm to no one. He does not see that obscenity is an evil so immoral that it stains everything it touches, even the air, whose vibrations will carry the contagion far. It is said that walls have ears, and this image was never so true as in such a matter. Pure and holy chastity will only definitively establish its reign on Earth when every creature that thinks and speaks has understood that it must never, in any circumstance, either write or pronounce a word that the purest virgin could not hear without blushing. You will say that you have no children and that there is not a single child in your house and, thus, you have no reason, in your opinion, to constrain yourselves. But if you yourselves were pure, you would not feel constrained; and have you not friends who listen to you, whom your example excites and who will perhaps lose, before children whom you do not know, the reserve that a remnant of modesty had made them observe until then? Then, it is almost always at meals that your spirit lets itself be carried away into witty sayings that provoke the laughter of the guests; but do you not see the servants who surround you, and your neighbor has children! You do not know that neighbor, nor his children, and you will never know the evil of which you were the cause; but the evil – be sure of it – come whence it may, will always be punished. Not only do walls have ears: in the air you breathe there are things you do not yet know or that you do not wish to know. No one has the right to demand of his subordinates a virtue that he neither practices nor possesses.

A single impure word suffices to alter the purity of a child; a single impure child introduced into a house of public education suffices to gangrene a whole generation of children who, later, will become men. Will there be a single sensible man who casts doubt on the patent and painful truth of this fact? No one doubts, no one is ignorant of the whole extent of the evil that a single word can bring about and, nevertheless, no one believes himself obliged to that chastity of the soul which revolts at every obscene thought, however disguised it may be and, even, in certain circumstances, no one regards as a strict moral obligation to abstain from jests that should make him blush, if he did not pride himself on not blushing. Sad and shameful pride! It is not only chastity that we should respect in children, but, also, that delicate candor at which every idea of falsehood makes the face blush; and that virtue is also very rare. But when one observes how the immense majority of our children are raised, we should not be much astonished. For most parents, children, above all at a tender age, are nothing but little dolls, with which they amuse themselves, as if they were a plaything. And what makes them so amusing is that their ingenuous credulity allows their patience to be abused, from morning to night, with little lies, judged innocent because they are made without any malice and solely, as is said, for laughs. Now, in its true acceptation, the word innocent means: that which does not harm. But, on the contrary, what is more harmful to the candor of a child than those little and continual abuses of confidence, of which it is innocent for an instant, but only for an instant, in order then to laugh and amuse itself, finding the greatest pleasure in imitating as soon as it can? From this it often results that the most candid child learns to deceive as quickly as it learns to speak, and that, after a little while, it is capable of giving lessons to its masters.

It is scarcely suspected, above all at that age, that often an insignificant cause may later provoke deplorable results. The organs of intelligence, in very young children, are like soft wax, apt to receive the mold of the weakest object that touches it and, even, to be deformed by it, though for an instant. And when this wax, at first so fluid, comes to harden, the impression will remain ineffaceable. It is an error to believe that it can be covered by others: only the primitive mark will remain indelible; on the contrary, it is the later impressions that will leave only a fleeting trace, beneath which the first will always appear.

Here is what very few young parents are capable of feeling with enough force to make of it a rule of conduct with their children, it being necessary that it be repeated to them continually.

Cécile Monvel.