This close relationship which admits to the Holy Place of the soul in its crisis cannot be lightly cast away, and as easily renewed at will.  It is a growth of the years, to be nurtured patiently, prayerfully, watchfully, steadily.  A guest in the home of a busy physician noted the peculiarly tender and close relationship which existed between the father and his son, a splendid boy of about ten years of age.  In answer to her comment upon it, the father said with moist eyes, “We are very close to one another.  I know there is a time coming in his life when he will need a father as he has never needed him before, and I mean to be ready.  I never take a long drive in the country, that I do not have him excused from school to go with me.  He wants to be a surgeon, so whenever I have to perform an operation, I always have him help me in some way.  Up to this time there is nothing that weighs for a minute with him over against an opportunity to be with me, and I am trying to keep his life so close to mine that nothing can ever come between us.”  When that boy reaches his crisis and life closes up, his father will be shut inside with him.  Is there any question as to the outcome, with a father and a father’s God within?

If, in the busy cares of life, the intimacy that God intended in the home has been lost, it may be found again if the price of its recovery be paid, but it is often a dear price, payable in the coin of self humiliation, sacrifice and tears.

The need of this close touch with another is apparent in the unspeakable longing of the adolescent heart for understanding and sympathy, for appreciation and recognition, for help in choosing the life work, and for love that is patient and deep.  Perhaps the greatest longing of all is to be trusted, to feel the strong grip of a hand and hear a voice vibrant with encouragement and assurance say, “I know you can do it.”  If the greatest successes in reformatory work come today through loving confidence in the one who has started wrong, who can measure the energizing power of such confidence in a life already striving toward the best?

The pathetic side of this craving for confidence appears in the distrust of self which is almost universal at times during these years.  A great wave of ambition and enthusiasm will sweep over the soul, and nothing seems too great to be attained, nor any obstacles unsurmountable.  As suddenly it will recede, the ideals become impossible, the individual but an atom in God’s great universe, the sky grows gray and hope dies out.  In the vacillation between energy and indifference, enthusiasm and apathy, self loving and self hating, goodness and badness, confidence and despair, the ebb and flow of the tide in the soul is revealed to understanding eyes.