turn, nature
records a contract, by the terms of which parents in want are entitled
to the same support from their children as the latter received from
them in the days of their helplessness.

Those who do not live up to the terms of this natural contract stand
amenable to the justice of Heaven. The obligation follows them during
life, wherever they go; and they can no more shirk it than they can
efface the characters that declare it, graven on their hearts. Nothing
but sheer impossibility can dispense them.

So sacred and inviolable is this obligation that it passes before that
of assisting wife and children, the necessity being equal; for filial
obligations enjoy the distinction of priority. Not even engagements
contracted before God hold against the duty of relieving parental
distress and want, for vows are of counsel and must yield to the
dictates of natural and divine law.

Of course, the gravity of this obligation is proportionate to the
stress of necessity under which parents labor. To constitute a mortal
sin of neglect, it is not necessary that a parent be in the extreme of
privation and beggary. It is not easy to draw the line between slight
and grievous offending in this matter, but if some young men and women
examined their conscience as carefully as they do their new spring
suits and hats, they would find material for confession the avowal of
which might be necessary to confessional integrity.

It has become the fashion with certain of the rising generation, after
draining the family exchequer for some sixteen or eighteen years, to
emancipate themselves as soon as their wages cover the cost of living,
with a little surplus. They pay their board, that is to say, they stand
towards their parents as a stranger would, and forgetting the debt
their younger years have piled up against them, they hand over a
miserable pittance just enough to cover the expenses of bed and board.
This might, and possibly does, make them "feel big," but that feeling
is a false one, and the "bigness" experienced is certainly not in their
moral worth, in many cases such conduct is a prevarication against the
law of God. This applies with equal force to young women whose vanity
overrides the claims of charity and justice, and who are said to "put
all their earnings on their backs," while they eat the bread that
another earns.

Frequently children leave home and leave all their obligations to their
parents behind them at home. If th