let me again make clear, if a child should say "I cannot truly affirm
God or His unity," I could not decently object, however harassed and
unhappy I might feel. I could not tolerate the vileness of racial
cowardice and desertion in a child, but I would have no right to break
with it because of religious dissent.

One of the conflicts irrepressible arises when there comes to be a
deep gulf fixed between the standards of parents and children, so deep
as to make harmonious living impossible. Though it seem by way of
excuse for children, it must be admitted that parental guidance is
ofttimes woefully lacking, when suddenly falls some edict or interdict
arbitrarily and unexpectedly imposed for which there has been no
preparation whatsoever. It may be torturing for parents to face the
facts, but they have no right to refuse to reap what they have sown,
to accept the wholly unavoidable consequences of the training of their
children. Parents who ask nothing of children for the first twenty
years may not suddenly turn about and ask everything. You cannot until
your child is twenty give all and after twenty forgive nothing.
Parents may not be idiotically doting for twenty years and then
suddenly become austerely exacting. I have seen parents, who accept a
young son's indolence, luxuriousness and dissipation of mind and body
as quite the correct thing for youth, later yield to regret over the
mental enervation and moral flabbiness of these sons.

A mother came to me not very long ago in tears over her son who had
married a poor wanton creature. What I could no more than vaguely hint
to the mother was that she had in some part prepared her son for the
moral catastrophe by attiring herself after the manner of a woman of the
streets. The household that exposes a son to the necessity of living
daily by the side of poor imitations of the street-woman will find his
ideals of womanhood sadly undermined in the end. The mother who does not
offer a son a glimpse of something of dignity and fineness in her own
life, alike in matter and manner, may expect little of her son.
Standards at best must be cultivated and illustrated through the years
of permeable childhood and cannot be improvised and insisted upon
whenever in parental judgment it may become necessary.

There is little to choose between the tragedy of parental rejection of
children's standards and filial abhorrence of the standards of
parents. And both types of tragedy occur from