the instantaneous and vivid manner in which certain
teachers spring into memory. They are seen as though actually living
again. We have difficulty in recalling even the subjects they taught,
while of the particulars of their teaching we have absolutely no
recollection. But they continue to influence us; they are like so many
silent forces leading our lives to this day. The teacher is always
greater than his lesson, and what he is, is greater than what he says.
The religious education of the young depends more on the gift of
persons, on contact with lives, than on anything else.

There are instructors and there are teachers; the former impart
information, the latter convey personality; the former deal with
subjects, the latter teach people. The greatest factor in education as a
process of developing persons is the power of stimulating personality.
The power of the family as an educational agency is in the fact that it
is an organization of persons for personal purposes. When you take the
persons away you remove all educational potencies.

The depersonalized home is the modern menace. We have come to think that
provided you throw furniture and food together in proper proportions you
can produce a capable life. So we depend on the home as a piece of
machinery to do its work automatically, forgetting that the working
activity is not the home but the family, not the furniture but people.
Life can only come from life, and lives can only come from lives.
Personality alone can develop personality. By so much as you rob the
family life of your personal presence, as mother or as father, you take
away from its reality as a family, from its force as an educational
agency, from its religious reality.

Sec. 1. ORPHANED FAMILIES

All that is said here about fathers might well be applied to mothers,
save that they are not as flagrant sinners in this respect, and,
besides, it comes with better grace for a father to speak on the sins of
fathers.

There are too many fathers who are financial and physiological fathers
only. A good father easily grows as crooked as a dollar sign when he is
nurtured only on money. Many, both fathers and mothers, take parenthood
wholly in physiological terms, imagining--if they think about it at
all--that they have fully discharged all possible obligations if only
they know how to bear, feed, and clothe children properly. True, such
duties are fundamental, but no father can be rightly called "a good