ver is done this day must
come to this test, Is this a ministry to the life of goodness, truth,
and loving service? Does this enrich lives? In other words, we may put
the broad educational test to the day and its program and determine all
by ministry to growing lives.

Sec. 2. CONSERVING THE VALUES

The family faces the problem of the opposition between the rights of man
on this day and the greed of commerce, the fight between a day of rest
and a day of work. Man's right to rest is assured, legally, but
commerce in the name of amusement and in the guise of petty and
unnecessary trading constantly maintains its fight to invade the day of
rest, to turn it from ministry to man as a person to the dull level of
the week of ministry to things. The home has much at stake in this
struggle. It needs one day free from the life that tears its members
apart, free from the toil that engrosses thought, free for its members
to live together as spiritual beings.

In the need for one day, free from the things that hinder and devoted to
the life of the spirit, the home finds the guiding principle for the use
of the day; all members are to be trained to use it as a glorious
opportunity, a welcome period, a day of the best things of life. It is
devoted to personality, to man's rights as a religious being.

Surely one of the best things of life will be that we shall meet one
another, shall look into faces of friends and companions! And this
opportunity of social mingling is lifted to a high level when it is an
act of the larger family life, the life that brings God and man into one
family. That is what the church meeting and service ought to be: our
Father's larger family getting together on the day of the life that
makes them one. For the child the church school and the children's
service of worship are their immediate points of vital touch with the
church family. If we think of the day as affording us the pleasure of
social mingling with friends and members of that family, Sunday morning
will cease to be a period of unwilling observance of empty duties. Of
course that will depend, too, on the measure in which the church and
school grasp their opportunity to make this the best of days.[31]

Further, let the home keep this day as the one of personal values all
the way through, sacred to that life of love, friendship, and joy in the
presence of one another which is the essential life of the family. It
has always been a good custom for