life when he
will need a father as he has never needed him before, and I mean to be
ready. I never take a long drive in the country, that I do not have him
excused from school to go with me. He wants to be a surgeon, so whenever
I have to perform an operation, I always have him help me in some way.
Up to this time there is nothing that weighs for a minute with him over
against an opportunity to be with me, and I am trying to keep his life
so close to mine that nothing can ever come between us." When that boy
reaches his crisis and life closes up, his father will be shut inside
with him. Is there any question as to the outcome, with a father and a
father's God within?

If, in the busy cares of life, the intimacy that God intended in the
home has been lost, it may be found again if the price of its recovery
be paid, but it is often a dear price, payable in the coin of self
humiliation, sacrifice and tears.

The need of this close touch with another is apparent in the unspeakable
longing of the adolescent heart for understanding and sympathy, for
appreciation and recognition, for help in choosing the life work, and
for love that is patient and deep. Perhaps the greatest longing of all
is to be trusted, to feel the strong grip of a hand and hear a voice
vibrant with encouragement and assurance say, "I know you can do it." If
the greatest successes in reformatory work come today through loving
confidence in the one who has started wrong, who can measure the
energizing power of such confidence in a life already striving toward
the best?

The pathetic side of this craving for confidence appears in the distrust
of self which is almost universal at times during these years. A great
wave of ambition and enthusiasm will sweep over the soul, and nothing
seems too great to be attained, nor any obstacles unsurmountable. As
suddenly it will recede, the ideals become impossible, the individual
but an atom in God's great universe, the sky grows gray and hope dies
out. In the vacillation between energy and indifference, enthusiasm and
apathy, self loving and self hating, goodness and badness, confidence
and despair, the ebb and flow of the tide in the soul is revealed to
understanding eyes.

For this fluctuation of purpose and failure to reach its high ideals,
stern sentence is passed at the inner bar of judgment, and though the
censure of another is resented, the soul bears great scars of
flagellation, self inflicted. The standard