The hard task before parents is to save their children from the snare of passive luxury.  Perhaps, remembering our toilsome youth, we seek to shield them.  It is a serious unkindness.  It is a wrong to our world.  The religious mind is the one that takes life in terms of service, sees the days as doors to ways of usefulness, girds itself with the towel, and finds honor in bending to do the little things for the least of men.  Vain is all family worship, all prayer and praise and catechism, unless we train the feet to walk this way so that they may visit the imprisoned, clothe the naked, comfort the sad, and cheer the broken in heart.  The family may make this the normal way to live.

If the family would train boys and girls who shall be true followers of the great Servant, it must stand among men as a servant, it must see itself as set in the community to serve, and by habits of service and helpfulness, by its whole social tone, it must quicken in its own people the sense of social obligation and a realization of the delight in self-giving.  A home that is selfish in relation to other homes, in relation to its community, can have no other than selfish, antisocial, and therefore irreligious children.  The first step in the welfare of a child is to see that the home which constitutes his personal atmosphere is steeped in the spirit of good-will toward men.

The whole attitude of life is determined by the thought-atmosphere of the family.  The greedy family makes the grafting citizen.  The grasping home makes the pugnacious disturber of the public peace.  Greater than the question whether you are a good citizen in your relation to the ballot box is the one whether you are a cultivator of good citizenship in your home.  No amount of Sunday-school teaching on the Beatitudes or week-day teaching on civics is going to overcome the down-drag of envious, antisocial thought and feeling and conversation in the home.  Home action and attitude count for more than all besides.

It is equally true that no other influence can offset the salutary power of a truly social home, that the easiest, most natural, and effective method of teaching social duty and unselfishness is to do our whole social duty unselfishly.

Sec. 5.  FAMILY TRAINING FOR SOCIAL LIVING

The supreme test of the religious life here is ability to live among men as brothers and to cause the conditions of the divine family to be realized on earth.  If we can realize that the purpose of Jesus was to bring men into the family of God, that the aim of all religious endeavor is the family character in men and women and the conditions of that family in all society, we must surely appreciate the possibility of the human family as a training school for this larger family of humanity.

The infant approaches social living by the pathway of the society of the family.  We all go out into life through widening circles, first the mother’s arms, then the family, the neighborhood, the city, the state, the nation, the world-life.  Each circle prepares for the next.  The family is the child’s social order; its life is his training for the larger life of nation and human brotherhood.