e virtually
attained the heights of omniscience, it is well for them to remember
that earth's greatest are not too proud to hold converse with the
lowliest, and that one's education is measured not by the number of
languages one speaks but by the fineness of spirit that shines through
one's speech, however ungrammatical and one's acts however unveneered.
Comradeship is not to be bought by parents, neither can it be bribed
by children. It must not mean the forfeiture of standards. The
comradeship that it not suffered to hold the target ever higher is not
comradeship but compromise. The comradeship that dare not press higher
standards is not comradeship. The comradeship that fears to urge the
ennobling ideal is not comradeship but concession.

I have before me as I write a letter or a fragment of a letter written
by a young sergeant of the French army to his parents ere he fared
forth in early August, 1914, to Lorraine,--a youth of promise on the
eve of fulfilment. These are his words, unread until after his death
in the following month, which he gloriously met, fighting to the end
against the overwhelming numbers to which he refused to surrender. "Be
sustained by the contemplation of the beautiful which you cannot fail
to love, and which brings you to the eternal principle to which our
soul returns.... It is not they who pass for whom we must mourn. I
desire but one thing, that I may have a death worthy of the life of my
admirable and truly loved father." No conflict here but perfect
concord, the concord of a perfect comradeship. The father a
distinguished servant of his country in war and peace, the mother a
seeker after God and the highest, had been as his comrades, going just
a little before and teaching him how to live and toil and hope. He
dared all and fell with peace in his heart and faith in his
unconquered soul that all was well, that the comradeship of earth
would merge at last in the comradeship eternal.

The Prophet was right: "And he shall turn the hearts of the fathers to
the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers." For the
Messiah is born when the hearts of parents and children are turned to
each other in reverence and selflessness. For then it is that the home
is brought nearer to the presence of God and that clashing and
conflict end--when, in the word of a noble teacher of our generation,
it is remembered that "the child is itself a gift, first to parents
out of the infinite, then by t