r to the occasions which disclose their unavoidableness. Thus
parents may find themselves in collision with maturing children over
the utterly sordid and gleamless character of their lives, or, what is
not less grave in its consequences, their "visionary and impractical
ways, so different from our well-tried _modus vivendi_." It is quite
safe to predict the rise of conflict of one character or another when
parents are unmindful of the higher responsibilities of their
vocation, the responsibility of making clear to children the reality
of moral and spiritual values.

The supreme parental responsibility is to give or to help children to
achieve for themselves those standards by which alone men truly live,
to give to children the impulse that shall reveal not what they may live
by but what they ought to live for. The one potent way to avoid future
conflict is so to make for, not point to, a goal that children shall not
become mere money-grubbers or perpetuators of ancient prejudices or
maintainers of false values or lawless upholders of the law.

Parents would do well to have in mind that the most just and terrible
of reproaches are often left unspoken. I am thinking of a youth who
had inherited a very large fortune. Happening to point out to him to
what uses his means might be put, this youth replied: "My parents
never ceased to tell me what not to do, but they never told me what it
is that I ought to do. There are no _oughts_ in my life which I have
gotten from my father. I have learned what I ought not to do and I
suppose that I know that." This was the young heir's revolt and, if
his word be true, wholly just revolt against the spirit of those
parents who seem to imagine it to be enough if they teach their
children such fundamentals as the perils of violating statutory law,
the inexpediency of coming into conflict with those ordinances which
it is the part of convention never to violate.

In one word, it is not enough to forbid and interdict. Obedience to
_don'ts_, however multitudinous, is not even the beginning of morality
though it lead to a certain degree of personal security. Forbidding
one's children to steal may keep them out of jail, but that is hardly
the highest end of life. More must be given them, such affirmations of
faith and life as make for high ideals, for true standards, for real
values. I have heard parents, lamenting over a child's misconduct,
offer the following in self-exculpation: "I never did