|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: he ought not to be dirty; he thinks that others despise him for
being dirty, and he half despises himself for being so. In all
raged schools and reformatories, so they tell me, the first step
toward restoring self-respect is to make the poor fellows clean.
From that moment they begin to look on themselves as new men--with
a new start, new hopes, new duties. For not without the deepest
physical as well as moral meaning, was baptism chosen by the old
Easterns, and adopted by our Lord Jesus Christ, as the sign of a
new life; and outward purity made the token and symbol of that
inward purity which is the parent of self-respect, and manliness,
and a clear conscience; of the free forehead, and the eye which
|
