Many a good father goes wrong here.  Love and ambition prompt him to provide abundantly for his children; he enslaves himself to give them those social advantages which he missed in youth.

But it is a short-measure love that gives only gifts and never gives itself.  The heart hungers, not for what you have in your hand, but for what you are.  “The gift without the giver is bare.”  No amount of bountiful providing can atone for the loss of the father’s personality.  It is easy for the hands to be so engrossed in providing that the home is left headless and soon heartless.  If we at all desire the fruits of character in the home we must give ourselves personally.

It is not alone the habitue of the saloon or the idler in clubs and fraternities who is guilty of stealing from the home its rightful share of his presence.  He who gives so much of himself to any object as not to give the best of himself to his family comes under the apostolic ban of being worse than an infidel. A father belongs to his home more than he belongs to his church. There have been men, though probably their number is not legion, who have allowed church duties, meetings, and obligations so to absorb their time and energy that they have given only a worn-out, burned-out, and useless fragment of themselves to their children.  Some have found it more attractive to talk of the heavenly home in prayer-meeting or to be gracious to the stranger and to win the smile of the neighbor at the church than to take up the by-no-means-easy task of being godly, sympathetic and cheerful, courteous and kind among their children and in their homes.  No matter what it may be, church or club, politics or reform organization, we are working at the wrong end if we are allowing them to take precedence of the home.

Sec. 2.  THE FATHER’S CHANCE

The father owes it to his family to give himself at his best, that is, as far as possible, when his vitality is freshest and his powers keenest to answer to the young life about him.  He owes it to his family to conserve for it the time to think of its needs, time to listen to the wife’s story of its problems, time to sit and sympathize with children, time to hear their seemingly idle prattle, time to play with them.  Have you ever noticed this great difference between the father and the mother, that while the latter always has time to bind up cut fingers and to hear to its end the story of what the little neighbor, Johnny Smith, did and said, somehow father’s ear seems deaf to such stories and he is often too busy to sympathize?  It might work a vast change in some families if the “children’s hour” had a call to the father as well as to the mother.  Of course we are crowded with social engagements and life is at high pressure under the enticing obligation of uplifting and reforming everybody else, yet one hour of every evening held sacred for the firelight conversation, one in which the children could really get at our hearts, might be worth more to tomorrow than all our public propaganda.