friends to visit on this day, for
families grown up and established around their own hearths to gather
again for a few hours. It is the day when we have time to discover how
much greater are the riches of friendship than aught besides, when,
looking into the eyes of those we love, we see "the light that never was
on sea or land," the ultimate good!

The hours of being together are the hours of real education. Children
cannot be with good and great people and remain the same. Their lives
need other lives. Above all, they need us. This should be the day for
real mothering and fathering. Nothing ought to be permitted to interfere
with this, neither our social pleasures nor the demands of the church.

Sec. 3. THE PROBLEM OF PLAY

What shall we do with the child who wants to play on Sunday? Is there
any other kind of child? They all want to. It is as natural for a child
to play as it is for a man to rest; it is as necessary. A child is a
growing person learning life by play. Because play seems trivial to us
we assume it is so to them; we would banish the trivial from the day
devoted to the higher life. In some families play is forbidden because
children find pleasure in it, and adults find it impossible to associate
piety and pleasure.

Shall we then throw down all barriers and make this day the same as all
others? No, rather make the day different by throwing down barriers that
stand on other days. Let this be the day when the barriers between
father and sons, parents and children, are let down and all can enter
into the joy of living.

Play is to a child the idealization of life's experiences and the
realization of its ideals. That is why he plays at school, idealizing
the everyday life; that is why he plays at housekeeping, at being in
church, at being a railway engineer, even a highwayman or an outlaw. The
traditional games are the game of life itself in terms of childhood.
Play as idealized experience and realized ideals is to the child what
the church, worship, and the reading of fiction and essays are to the
adult. Play is the child's method of reaching forward into life's
meaning. Some games as old as history carry a weight of human tradition
and experience as rich for a child as the adult obtains from historical
review and from association with the past. There is a sense in which the
child playing these games opens the Bible of the race.[32]

We cannot make children over into our pattern; we have to learn f