tions, there is scarcely any thing
which we take less pains to cultivate into all that it is capable of
becoming. In most instances, the life of the home is so close to us,
so identified with ourselves, accepted with such a matter of course
security, that we overlook the delicate conditions for preserving its
freshness and securing its increase. But, in every relation of
persons, there are two sets of conditions, corresponding with the two
sides, neither of which can be neglected with impunity. There are a
multitude of homes which are centres of irritation and wretchedness,
miniature hells to their occupants.

The first thing to be done is to turn thought to the subject, break
up the apathy of routine, secure an earnest appreciation of the facts
in the case, and then study the remedy.

One great obstacle to the desired friendships of parents and children
consists in the difficulty of a perfect sympathy between persons
marked by such differences of age, position, interest, and
experience. Those of the same years, passions, pleasures, duties,
will naturally sympathize the most easily. But in all these respects
the disparities of parent and child are equally numerous and
striking.

They look at things from opposed points of view; they judge of
subjects in the light respectively of experience and of inexperience.
This great and constant contrast must give rise to innumerable
discrepancies of opinion and of desire, provocative of disagreements,
if not of dislikes. Nature has, however, provided powerful
neutralizers for this obstacle to sympathy between those who are so
widely unlike, counteractives which forcibly tend to prevent
disagreements from breeding hostilities. These counteractives are the
profound instincts of parental fondness and filial reverence, the
first of which tends to make the parents enter into the spiritual
states of their children, and to look at things from their point of
view; and the second, to make the children, with docile duteousness,
adopt as their own the conclusions of their parents. These
counteractives ought to be carefully fostered, neither party
forgetting the differences between himself and the other, but
endeavoring to bridge those differences by the identifying powers of
imagination and sympathy. Another frequent destroyer or lessener of
the natural love of parents and children is the conflict between the
rightful authority of the former and the wilful impulses of the
latter.

Matu