Intellectual acuteness, mastery of faculty, elegance of expression, are something very different from insight into the meaning of life.  The cultured man is he who has learned his relations to his fellow-men, who recognizes his obligations toward them; and his relations to the unseen and his duty toward it.

Discipline which will produce such results will ever be sought by the awakened soul.  It will be satisfied with nothing less.

The relation of nurture and culture to the ascent of the soul is now evident.  Both are the agencies by which all impediment and bias are to be removed, and by which the soul is to come to the realization of pure power.  They are the means by which complete self-realization is to be attained; they are the study of perfection.  Nurture is what is done for the soul by parents and friends in its plastic years; culture is the means which the soul chooses in order that its growth may be hastened.  Nurture is chiefly promoted by lofty examples, noble ideals,—­in short, by beneficent environment; but culture is attained by the conscious effort of the individual, by his own choice of healthful environment, worthy example, inspiring companionships, and, perhaps still more, by long and patient study of the facts of our mortal life, of the revelations which have come from the unseen, and of the prophecies of the future which are within the soul.  There is a deep and almost terrible significance in the text, “No man liveth to himself.”  Every person is independent and free and yet is bound to every other.  Most delicate and vital of all human relations is that of parent and child.  How far one may be responsible for the other may be difficult to decide, but that the one influences the other, inevitably and forever, is beyond question.  In many ways the child is what he is made by the parent.  Therefore the welfare of the child as a spirit, and not merely as a body, should be a continual study.  He who has dared to become a parent can never honorably shirk the duty of nurture.  The connection between souls is a great mystery, but the mystery does not lessen the obligation.  We are responsible not only for the existence of our children, but equally for their growth.  It is the parent’s privilege to make sure that they start on the journey of life properly equipped, and with no undue obstacles in their pathway—­to make them realize that they are not only his children but also children of God; and that they are to live not only in time but in eternity.

The training of the body is needful, and that of the mind still more so, but that of the spirit is absolutely essential to its welfare.  Therefore plans and provisions for nurture first, last, and always should be to the end that the soul may realize that it is from God, and that its goal and glory are union with Him.

And those who realize that they are free, that they are in a moral order, that a noble destiny awaits them, should make everything in thought, in study, in association, in companionship, bend toward the perfection of being, the development of power, and the realization of the life of the spirit.  Nurture does much for every man, his parents and friends also do much but, at last, when all mysteries are disclosed and self-revelation is complete, it may be found that each one does quite as much for himself as any one else, or every one else, does for him.