We know we felt that way, but we are loath to believe our children also cherish their high hopes.  And so the tendency of the adult is to treat with cynicism the dreams of youth.  Often we sedulously endeavor to pervert him to our blase view of the world; we would have him believe it is a fated heap of cinders instead of an almost new thing to be formed and made perfect.  In the home those ideals must be nourished and guided.  See that at hand there are the songs and essays of the idealists.  Give them Emerson and forget your Nietzsche.  Renew your own youth.  Get some of Isaiah’s passion and let it breathe its fervor on them.  Feed by poem, song, story, essay, and conversation the life of ideals.

Stop long enough to see the life that like an engine with steam up is surely going somewhere and help it to find an engineer.  We call this the period of sowing wild oats.  Wild oats are simply energies invested in the wrong places.  The dynamic of youth must go somewhere and do something.  Fundamentally it would rather go to the good than the bad.  We know that this was true of us at that time; why should we assume less of others?  Hold to your faith in youth.  Fathers who with open eyes and active minds—­not with sleepy fatalism—­believe in their boys, have boys who believe in them.

They wait for leadership.  If you have dropped into the easy slippers of indifference to social reform and other types of ideal service, get back into the fight again beside this new man of yours.

They wait for friendship in this matter of their ideals and their service.  At any cost keep open house of the heart.

They wait for a life-task.  This is the period of vocational choice.  It will make a tremendous difference to this life whether his work shall be merely a matter of making a living or shall be his chance to invest life in accordance with his new ideals.  Shall he go out to be merely one of the many wage-earners or salary-winners to whom life is a great orange from which he will get all the juice if he can, regardless of who else goes thirsty?  Or shall he see an occupation as his chance to pay back to today and tomorrow that which he owes to yesterday? as his chance to give the world himself?  He need not be a minister or a missionary to make his life a ministry; he will find life, he will be a religious person in no other way than as his dominating motive shall be to find the fulness of life in order to have a full life to give to God’s world.  The answer will depend on what life means to you, how you are interpreting it, and how you aid him in thinking of it and making his high choice.  You will have abundant opportunity to show what it is to you—­as you have been doing all along—­by your daily attitude; you will have abundant opportunity to talk it all over, for he will certainly discuss his trade or profession with you.  The family must give to the life of the new day makers of families to whom life means a chance to realize the God-vision of the world.