On the Duties of Young Men

The truth about how a man behaves, told plainly to a young man in ninety-six pages, with six letters of Fr. Lacordaire.

Silvio Pellico wrote this for one young man he knew and published it in the hope that it would be useful to young men in general. It is not a treatise, and he says so in the preface: a man who cannot find the reasons for honesty and religion in his own conscience will not find them in a book. What he offers is a plain account of the duties a young man meets as he grows up, in thirty-two chapters of two or three pages each, and he never talks down to his reader. Resolve never to lie, because a single exception becomes fifty. Do not call a man your friend until you know he is virtuous. Pray over your choice of a career for weeks, then commit and stop looking back. If you have not mastered your temper, do not take a wife. Shun anyone who does not honor his own mother in every woman. He admits that he once lived as if the faith were beneath him, so none of it is preached from a height.

The book closes with six letters that Fr. Lacordaire wrote to a student between 1850 and 1860. They are affectionate and direct. He tells a boy who has worked himself into a sore throat to go to work gently, congratulates him on dropping companions whose talk was not clean, and gives him one rule for the company of women: avoid anything you could not do or say in front of witnesses.

A good book to give at confirmation or graduation, or for a young man to read on his own at sixteen or twenty. It is short enough that he will finish it, and plain enough that he will remember it.

About this edition

Set from the English translation by R. A. Vain, published by D. & J. Sadlier & Co. in 1872, with the Lacordaire letters as printed there. The wording of the historical text is preserved in this newly typeset edition. EPUB edition.