than ourselves, and this pathway of sacrifice, this costly way of home-making, is a man’s chance to become Godlike.  The race has come upward in this way.  It needs the masculine in its ideal self as well as the feminine.  There is no race salvation without constant individual self-giving.  That self-giving must be balanced equally on the part of the man and the woman.  Fatherhood, like motherhood, is just our chance to learn life’s best lesson, that there is a certain short path to happiness which men have called the way of pain and God calls the way of peace.

Motherhood is a sacred portion, but so is fatherhood.  Its calls are just as high, its service just as holy, its opportunities just as large, its meaning just as divine.  How worse than empty are all our pratings about divine fatherhood if we illustrate its meaning only degradingly or misleadingly!  And just as the life of the spirit is the gift of that divine fatherhood, so for us the gift of our lives, ourselves, is the largest and richest contribution we can make to the religious lives of our children.

The father as a teacher teaches by what he is.  The classes in the home have no set lessons, for the text is written in lives and the word is spoken and taught in personality.  You effect the religious education of your children in the degree that you give yourself as a simple religious person to them.

     I. References for Study

     Hodges, Training of Children in Religion, chap. vii.  Appleton,
     $1.50.

     K.G.  Busby, Home Life in America, chaps. i, ii.  Macmillan,
     $2.00.

     II.  Further Reading

     E.A.  Abbott, On the Training of Parents.  Houghton Mifflin Co.,
     $1.00.

     Allen, Making the Most of Our Children. 2 vols.  McClurg, $1.00
     each.

     Wilm, The Culture of Religion, chap. ii.  Pilgrim Press, $0.75

     III.  Topics for Discussion

     1.  Which do you remember best, your teachers or your lessons?  Why?

     2.  Describe, from your memory, some of the influences of
     personality?

     3.  Are these influences greater or less with parents on children?

     4.  What are the causes that separate parents and children?

     5.  How shall we define duties to business, to society, and to the
     family?

     6.  Under what circumstances is one justified in refusing time to
     the church for the sake of the family?

     7.  What are the best times and opportunities for the strengthening
     of the personal bonds between children and parents?

     8.  How shall we overcome the apparent difficulty of maintaining the
     confidence of children?

CHAPTER XXIV

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE