Oh, I would entreat you to set yourself firmly against this evil tendency of our day, to which I cannot but believe so much of its agnosticism is due,—­that deadening down and stamping out of the spiritual instincts of our nature, those great intuitions of the soul, which lie both above and below all reasoning and logic and form their basis rather than their apex.  Once let the springs of reverence be choked up, once let that window of the soul be overgrown with weeds and cobwebs, and your most careful training will only produce a character estimable in many respects, but for the most part without noble aspirations, without high ideals, with no great enthusiasms—­a character, to use Saint Beuve’s expressive phrase, “tout en facade sur la rue,” whose moral judgments are no better than street cries; the type of man that accepts the degradation of women with blank alacrity as a necessity of civilization, and would have it regulated, like any other commodity for the market; that very common type of character which, whatever its good qualities, spreads an atmosphere of blight around it, stunting all upward growing things and flattening down our life to the dead level of desert sands.

If you would not be satisfied at your boy rising no higher than this, then, again I say, guard the springs of reverence.  Do not let your pride in your child’s smartness or any momentary sense of humor make you pass over any little speech that savors of irreverence; check it instantly.  Exact respect for yourself and for the boy’s father, the respect which is no enemy, but the reverse, to the uttermost of fondness.  Insist upon good manners and respectful attention to the guests of your house.  Do not despise the good old fashion of family prayers because they do not rise to all that we might wish them to be.  At least they form a daily recognition of “Him in whom the families of the earth are blessed”—­a daily recognition which that keen observer of English life, the late American Ambassador, Mr. Bayard, pointed out as one of the great secrets of England’s greatness, and which forms a valuable school for habits of reverence and discipline for the children of the family.  Insist upon the boys being down in time for the worship of God, and do not allow them to get into the habit indulged in by so many young men of “sloping” down with slippered feet long after breakfast is done and prayers are over.

Only let the springs of reverence well up in your child’s soul, and then, and then only, will you be able to give your boy what, after all, must always be the greatest safeguard from shipwreck in this perilous world—­religious faith, that stops him at the very threshold of temptation with the words:  “How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” Your very attitude as you kneel by his side with bowed head and folded hands while he says his little evening and morning prayer will breathe into his soul a sense of a Divine Presence about our bed and about our path.  Your love—­so