st and most sacred joys of our life?

He safely walks in darkest ways
Whose youth is lighted from above,
Where, through the senses' silvery haze,
Dawns the veiled moon of nuptial love.

"Who is the happy husband? He
Who, scanning his unwedded life,
Thanks God, with all his conscience free,
'Twas faithful to his future wife."[26]

Again, could we not give our boys a little more teaching about the true
nature and sacredness of fatherhood? It always strikes me that the true
ethics of fatherhood are not yet born. Were the true nature, the
sacredness, and the immense responsibilities of fatherhood really and
duly recognized, men could not look with the appalling lightness with
which they do on providing some substitute for marriage, when they have
not the means to marry in early life, and are under the very prevalent
illusion that continent men who marry late run the risk of a childless
marriage--a notion which so great an authority as Acton pronounces to be
absolutely false physiologically, and without foundation in fact. To
bring a child into the world to whom he can perform no one of the duties
of a father, and to whom he deliberately gives a mother with a tarnished
name--a mother who, from the initial wrong done to her and the stigma
which deprives her of the society of women, will only too probably not
stay her feet at the first wrong step, but be drawn down that dread
winding stair which ends in the despair of a lost soul--this, I urge,
would be utterly abhorrent to every even fairly right-thinking man,
instead of the very common thing it is. Did we see it truly, it would be
a not venial sin, but an unpardonable crime.

Now, surely mothers can supply some teaching here which must be wanting
for public opinion to be what it is. A quiet talk about the high nature,
the duties and responsibilities of fatherhood cannot present any great
difficulties.

I remember many years ago hearing Canon Knox Little preach a sermon in
York Cathedral to a large mixed congregation, in which he touched on
this subject. At this distance of time I can only give the freest
rendering of his words, the more so as I have so often used them in my
own meetings that I may have unconsciously moulded them after my own
fashion. "Look," he said, "at that dying father--dying in the faith,
having fought the good fight, and all heaven now opening before his
dying gaze. Yet he withdraws his thoughts from that g