I remember in a series of allegorical pictures by an old master in the Baptistery at Florence, how, with the divine instinct of poets and artists, in the beautiful symbolic figure of Hope, the painter has placed a lily in her hands.  Cannot we teach our sons that if they are to realize their dearest hope in life, that divine hope must ever bear a lily in her hand as the only wand that can open to them the paradise of the ideal, the divine vision which is “the master light of all our seeing,” the deepest and most sacred joys of our life?

    He safely walks in darkest ways
      Whose youth is lighted from above,
    Where, through the senses’ silvery haze,
      Dawns the veiled moon of nuptial love.

    “Who is the happy husband?  He
      Who, scanning his unwedded life,
    Thanks God, with all his conscience free,
      ’Twas faithful to his future wife."[26]

Again, could we not give our boys a little more teaching about the true nature and sacredness of fatherhood?  It always strikes me that the true ethics of fatherhood are not yet born.  Were the true nature, the sacredness, and the immense responsibilities of fatherhood really and duly recognized, men could not look with the appalling lightness with which they do on providing some substitute for marriage, when they have not the means to marry in early life, and are under the very prevalent illusion that continent men who marry late run the risk of a childless marriage—­a notion which so great an authority as Acton pronounces to be absolutely false physiologically, and without foundation in fact.  To bring a child into the world to whom he can perform no one of the duties of a father, and to whom he deliberately gives a mother with a tarnished name—­a mother who, from the initial wrong done to her and the stigma which deprives her of the society of women, will only too probably not stay her feet at the first wrong step, but be drawn down that dread winding stair which ends in the despair of a lost soul—­this, I urge, would be utterly abhorrent to every even fairly right-thinking man, instead of the very common thing it is.  Did we see it truly, it would be a not venial sin, but an unpardonable crime.

Now, surely mothers can supply some teaching here which must be wanting for public opinion to be what it is.  A quiet talk about the high nature, the duties and responsibilities of fatherhood cannot present any great difficulties.

I remember many years ago hearing Canon Knox Little preach a sermon in York Cathedral to a large mixed congregation, in which he touched on this subject.  At this distance of time I can only give the freest rendering of his words, the more so as I have so often used them in my own meetings that I may have unconsciously moulded them after my own fashion.  “Look,” he said, “at that dying father—­dying in the faith, having fought the good fight, and all heaven now opening before his dying gaze.  Yet he withdraws his thoughts from that great hereafter to centre them upon the little lad who stands at his bedside.  His hands wander over the golden head with