The educational process is continuous.  The children in the home are being moved, stimulated, every instant, and they are being changed in minute but nevertheless real and important degrees by each impression.  There is never a moment in which their character is not being developed either for good or for ill.  Religious education—­that is, the development of their lives as religious persons—­goes on all the time in the home, and it is either for good or for ill.

Next to the idea of the continuous and all-pervasive character of this process of religious development the most important thought for us is that religious education in the home may be determined by ourselves.  This continuous, fateful process is not a blind, resistless one.  It is our duty to direct it.  It is possible for wise parents to determine the characters of their children.  We must not forget this.  It cannot be too strongly insisted on.  The development of life is under law.  This is an orderly world.  Things do not just happen in it.  We believe in a law that determines the type of a cabbage, the character of a weed.  Do we believe that this universe is so ordered that there is a law for weeds and none for the higher life of man?  Do we hold that cabbages grow by law but character comes by chance?  If there is a law we may find it and must obey it.  If we may know how to develop character, with as great certainty as we know how to do our daily work, will not this be our highest task, our greatest joy, the supreme thing to do in life?

Sec. 4.  THE CONSEQUENT OBLIGATION

This is the first great obligation of parents and of those who are willing to accept the joys and responsibilities of parenthood.  We have no right to bring into this world lives with all the possibilities that a religious nature involves unless we know how to develop those lives for the best and from the worst.  When we picture what a little child may become, from the vile, depraved, despoiling beast or the despicable, sneaking hypocrite on one extreme, to the upright, God-loving, man-serving man or woman with the love of purity, honor, truth, and goodness speaking through the life, we may well pause, realizing we need more than a sentimental desire that the child may reach the heights of goodness:  we must know the way there and the methods of leading the life in that way.  True devotion to God and to childhood will mean more than petitions for the salvation of children; it will mean the prayer that is labor and the labor that is prayer to know how they may attain fulness of spiritual life; it will mean reverent searching into the divine ways of growth in grace.  The study of the means and methods of religious education, especially of children, in the home and family, is one of the most evident and important religious duties resting on parents and all who contemplate marriage and family life.

Sec. 5.  WHAT IS MEANT BY THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD?