this task.  The family, like every other element of human life, is susceptible of progress, and from epoch to epoch its tendencies and aspirations are enlarged, although its duties can never be abrogated and its obligations can never be cancelled.  It is impossible to bring about the higher development by any self-assertion or breaking away of the individual will.  The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress.  The family in its entirety must be carried out into the larger life.  Its various members together must recognize and acknowledge the validity of the social obligation.  When this does not occur we have a most flagrant example of the ill-adjustment and misery arising when an ethical code is applied too rigorously and too conscientiously to conditions which are no longer the same as when the code was instituted, and for which it was never designed.  We have all seen parental control and the family claim assert their authority in fields of effort which belong to the adult judgment of the child and pertain to activity quite outside the family life.  Probably the distinctively family tragedy of which we all catch glimpses now and then, is the assertion of this authority through all the entanglements of wounded affection and misunderstanding.  We see parents and children acting from conscientious motives and with the tenderest affection, yet bringing about a misery which can scarcely be hidden.

Such glimpses remind us of that tragedy enacted centuries ago in Assisi, when the eager young noble cast his very clothing at his father’s feet, dramatically renouncing his filial allegiance, and formally subjecting the narrow family claim to the wider and more universal duty.  All the conflict of tragedy ensued which might have been averted, had the father recognized the higher claim, and had he been willing to subordinate and adjust his own claim to it.  The father considered his son disrespectful and hard-hearted, yet we know St. Francis to have been the most tender and loving of men, responsive to all possible ties, even to those of inanimate nature.  We know that by his affections he freed the frozen life of his time.  The elements of tragedy lay in the narrowness of the father’s mind; in his lack of comprehension and his lack of sympathy with the power which was moving his son, and which was but part of the religious revival which swept Europe from end to end in the early part of the thirteenth century; the same power which built the cathedrals of the North, and produced the saints and sages of the South.  But the father’s situation was nevertheless genuine; he felt his heart sore and angry, and his dignity covered with disrespect.  He could not, indeed, have felt otherwise, unless he had been touched by the fire of the same revival, and lifted out of and away from the contemplation of himself and his narrower claim.  It is another proof that the notion of a larger obligation can only come through the response to an enlarged interest in life and in the social movements around us.