Have any of you the lurking thought, “I was born by no choice of my own:  those who brought me into the world owe duty to me, not I to them?” I have known some say this, and I have known many act as if they thought it, and I have known some who felt as if God had better work for them to do outside home, and have either gone off to do it, or have chafed against life because they could not go.  It does seem to me that the present very general eclipse of the old Roman virtue of filial piety lies at the root of much of the unsound work, and of the undone work, of the present day.

Know your own work, and do it.  What is your work on leaving school?  Is it not to learn to fit into your home?  At school, when you got your remove, your duty was to get into the work of the new form, and to do it.  You have now been moved to higher and far more difficult work than any sixth form, you are in the school of home.  Are you learning its lessons, or are you fretting for a remove?  It may be you find life so easy and pleasant at home that you feel any talk of its difficulties does not apply to you; it is all play so far.  But I know so many who feel this friction on leaving school, that I am sure it must be the case with some of you.

If any here fail to feel the debt they owe at home—­the debt which God enforced as next to the debt owed to Himself—­let me remind them that the whole instinct of mankind has responded to the appeal of parents; filial piety has always been reverenced and held beautiful, and the hereditary sense of mankind must be taken into account in deciding what is, or is not, a virtue.  But supposing I granted, for the sake of argument, that the original debt was on your parents’ side and not on yours, what then?  You remain as bound as ever to show them submission and devotion; all, in short, that the old-fashioned believers in the Fifth Commandment thought to be due from a daughter.  If you are striving after a noble life you must give all this,—­if you owe allegiance to either the Christian ideal of love or to the Pagan one of strength.  “If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God Whom he hath not seen?” and, equally, if he love not his brother close at hand, how can he love brethren afar off?  It is a poor sort of love which lavishes itself on self-chosen and, therefore, less irritating objects of charity, and is powerless to influence the home atmosphere.  It is a poor sort of strength which shrinks from the hardest fight, from the conquest of self at home.

Is not every right and wise piece of good work for others an attempt to help them to train themselves to live a higher life?  And can we dare to put our hand to this plough while neglecting our own training?

I was asked to speak to you about WORK, and you may think I am forgetting this in dwelling on home life.  Not at all; I am looking on home life not as an end in itself, but as God’s great training-school for His best workers; as the special place for the development of those qualities which are essential to all true and lasting work for “the Relief of Man’s Estate.”