Safeguarding the Irreplaceably Precious

In speaking of the factors of friendship⎯trust and confidence being uppermost among them⎯we come to the conclusion that finding someone who can be trusted is one of the most sincerely satisfying assurances in all the relationships of life.
There are many kinds of trust⎯ and there are many kinds of mistrust⎯ and many things we do, at great cost and inconvenience, to guard against mistrust among men. We lock money in the safe. We put stocks and securities in vaults. We lock our doors and bond employees, and pay for police protection. Indeed, in safeguarding tangibles we often take extreme precautions.
How well then should we safeguard some other things that are infinitely more precious and irreplaceable? How well, for example, should we safeguard the moral atmosphere and environment in which the minds and characters of our children are molded? Should we, for example, entrust our daughters to unknown or unreliable escorts? Should we leave to chance the safety of things most irreplaceably precious? (Someone shrewdly said that some people who can trace their families back for centuries, don’t know where their children were last evening.)
Sometimes young people don’t seem to see why we need to know where they are going and with whom and when they will be back. But we wouldn’t let a stranger walk away with money or securities or priceless material possessions without knowing much about him, or without some suitable safeguards. Should we safeguard with less caution or more carelessness our children, their virtue, their happiness, their hearts? And should youth themselves be so shortsighted as to resent our needing to know, our right and responsibility to know, something about the places they go and the people with whom they keep company?
Old-fashioned , some may say. So is happiness old-fashioned. So is safety. So are the commandments of God old-fashioned, in the same sense. So is heartbreak⎯ and all its causes and consequences⎯ and all the false assumptions that foolishly lead to laxity in safeguarding character and conduct, and in exposing virtue to being violated.
“If we are prudent men,” said Cicero, “we shall rein in our impulse to affection as we do chariot horses. We make a preliminary trial of horses. So we should of friendship; and should test our friends’ characters by a kind of tentative friendship” ⎯ and safeguard virtue and the precious and irreplaceable things with no less vigilance than we use in protecting property.