by wrong-doing of the child, is as
securely fibred upon the picture of grandma, ever ready to heal and
comfort, as upon that of the mother, whose daily ministrations make
the child comfortable.

=The Special Gifts of the Old to the Home and the World.=--In some
ways it is surely more easy to believe in goodness at the heart of
things because some aged man or woman, closely related by blood and
breeding, has been a living example of what must be revered. Moreover,
to the family, as to the world-at-large, old age brings a special
gift--if that old age is what it may be. Each period of life has its
own gift to make. Age should make a precious contribution, even the
central faith of life.

Youth, eager, responsive to all noble ambitions and touched by all
noble dissatisfactions with what is, makes its plan for what should be
on a strictly logical basis. His rejected Evil is wholly evil; his
chosen Good without a flaw. Children are all Calvinists; and youth,
for the most part, separates its ideas of good and bad as the sheep
and goats within its mind. Well that it is so. The law of growth in
life is so far from logical, so operative by inconsistent
fluctuations, that it is of the greatest social use for each fresh
generation of reformers to hew to the line and express that
intolerance of compromise which helps the struggling moral sense to
clarify the issues of each new day.

In middle life, if the individual worker for better things is not
merely a prophesier but has become an actual agent for the realization
of his ideal in practical achievement, he suffers many a disillusion,
not in respect to his ideal, but in respect to the ease of working it
into the body politic or into the compelling purpose of the social
mind. That is the time of danger; and how many lose heart and hope and
fall weakly by the way when they first learn that to state a truth
with power is not enough to insure its acceptance! That one should set
himself with courage and faith to the long, slow processes of actual
change of the social order after he has learned how difficult that is,
is to be indeed a hero--a hero of the actualization of the ideal, even
though he dies with the promised land hardly in sight.

In later life comes to many, and should to all, another gift. Not
alone the vision of youth, never lost and always dear; not only the
strength of open-eyed effort to achieve so much of the ideal, even its
very least atom, as the times and the c