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unfitting in itself or one to which they are unadapted. But here we
deal with a variant of the insistence that parental experience shall
avert filial mischance or hurt. And here I must again insist that
children have just the same right to make mistakes that we have
exercised. They may not make quite as many as we made. It does not
seem possible that they could. But, in any event, they have the right
to make for that wisdom which comes of living amid toil and weariness
and agony and all the never wholly hopeless blundering of life.

Upon parents may lie the duty to offer guidance, but compulsion is
always unavailing and when availing leaves embitterment behind. It is
woeful to watch a child mar its life but forcible intervention rarely
serves to avert the calamity. One is tempted to counsel parents to
consider thrice before they urge a particular calling upon a child. I
have seen some young and promising lives wrecked by parental
insistence that one or another calling be adopted. That a father is in
a calling or occupation is a quite insufficient reason for a son being
constrained to make it his own. A man or woman in the last analysis
has the right of choice in the matter of calling, and parents have no
more right to choose a calling than to choose a wife or husband for a
son or daughter.

A most fertile cause of conflict is at hand in the normal
determination of parents to transmit the faith of the fathers to the
children. The conflict is often embittered after the fashion of
religious controversy, when parents are inflexibly loyal to their
faith, passionately keen to share their precious heritage with the
children, while children grow increasingly resolved to think their own
and not their fathers' thoughts after God. It is easier to commend
than to practice the art of patience with the heretical child, and yet
our age is mastering that art,--the cynic would aver because of
wide-spread indifference. Surely there can be no sorrier coercion than
that which insists upon filial acquiescence in the religious dogmas
held by parents, not less sorry because the parents may be merely
renewing the coercive traditions of their own youth.

It is a hurt alike to children and to truth, to say nothing of the
institutions of religion, to command faith the essence and beauty of
which lies in its voluntariness. But if parents are not free to
coerce the minds of their children touching articles of faith, it is
for children to rem