Sec. 4.  AT THE DOOR OF A NEW WORLD

As through friendships the youth enters and explores this wonderful realm of personality he will find some persons more wonderful than others.  Those instincts of which he is largely unconscious will impel him to make a selection.  The same law is operative with the young woman.  Mating is normally always first on the higher levels of personalities; it first calls itself friendship, nor does it think farther.  But father and mother, if they have the least spiritual vision, stand in awe as they see their children taking their first evident steps toward home-making.  What an opportunity is theirs!

Yet here, as the home faces its duty toward a family yet to be, is just where some of the most serious mistakes are made.  This is no time for teasing and jesting, still less for mocking ridicule.  If you treat this essentially sacred step as a joke it will not be strange if the young people follow suit and take marriage as a yet larger joke.  The home is the place where the home is treated most irreverently.  Of course one must not take too seriously those “calf” courtships, prematurely fostered by boys and girls, under the pressure of the high-school tendency to anticipate all of life’s riper experiences.  But even here jesting and teasing will only tend to confirm and make permanent what would be but a temporary aberration.  In that case either silence or kindly, simple advice will help most of all.

To young people who think at all courtship has its times of vision, when they stand trembling before the unknown future, when they, with youth’s idealism, make high vows and stand on high places.  Give them at least the opportunity to enter your inmost self, to find there all the light you can give them and all the memory of your own joys and hopes.  Make them feel, though you need not say it, that they are at the threshold of a temple.  If to you this is an affair of the spirit it will be a matter of religion to them.

Approached in such a temper, many of the practical problems of courtship settle themselves.  Take the case of the young man at home.  If he knows that you think with him of the high meaning of this experience he will not hesitate to bring the young woman to the home.  She will feel your attitude.  Upon this level questions of times and seasons, hours in the parlor, and all the matters of their relations will settle themselves.  If you treat courtship as a matter of the spirit he will do just what he most of all wants to do, treat this woman who is to be his mate as a person, a spirit, with reverence and love that lifts itself above lust.  This is the only ground upon which you can appeal to either in matters of conduct at this time.  The conventions of society they will despise; but the inner law speaks to them when the outer letter has no meaning.

Sec. 5.  THE SOCIAL LIFE