ey will cease to stuff their children's bodies
and cram their minds while starving their souls. How often, alas, do
parents pamper their children in their lower nature while pauperizing
their higher nature, because of their failure to see that not alone
were they co-authors of a child-body but that they are to be the
continuing re-makers of a child's mind and spirit.

Are there quite enough parents like the father of a friend into whose
young hands at leave-taking from home his father placed a Bible and a
copy of the poems of Burns with the parting word,--Love and cling to
both, but if you must give up the Bible cling to Burns. But verily we
can give nothing more to our children than clothes and food and money
until we remember to make something of ourselves. It is not easy for
the stream of domestic influence to rise higher than the parental
level. Time and again I have heard a father exclaim: "I am going to
leave my boy so well off that he won't have to shoulder the burdens
which all but crushed me." Less often have I seen a father so rear
his son that he revealed his inmost purpose to be the fostering of his
son's nobleness. Are there as many parents who would have their
children finely serviceable as highly successful?

CHAPTER V

THE OBLIGATION OF BEING

But the primary duty of parents is to learn and to teach that happiness
is not the supreme end of life and to dare to live it. We are so bent
upon giving to our children that we forget to ask aught of them. We seem
to be unmindful of what the wisest teacher of our generation has called
the danger of luxury in the lives of our children. Those parents who in
largest measure have learned to do without seem to think that they must
overwhelm their children with things. How many parents are equal to the
wisdom of the heroic Belgian mother who would not permit her children to
leave Belgium in the hour of its deepest stress and suffering, saying:
"Yes, we intended to take our children to England for safety but when we
remembered that in the future they might hold important positions in our
country and perhaps be influential in future leadership, we did not
want them to come to this work ignorant of what our people have
undergone and suffered during this terrible war. They would not have
known because they would have spent all the period of the war in
pleasant living in England. When we thought of this, we felt with
sinking hearts that we owed it to them and the