provider" who provides only _things_ for his family, no matter with what
generosity he provides these things. Our homes need more of ourselves
first of all.

He makes a capital error of setting first things in secondary places who
willingly permits business to interfere with the pleasure of being with
his children. Our social order fights its own welfare as long as any
father is chained to the wheels of industry through the hours that
belong to his home. But there are just as many who are not chained, but
who enslave themselves to business, and so miss the largest and best
business in the world, the development of children's characters.

Many a good father goes wrong here. Love and ambition prompt him to
provide abundantly for his children; he enslaves himself to give them
those social advantages which he missed in youth.

But it is a short-measure love that gives only gifts and never gives
itself. The heart hungers, not for what you have in your hand, but for
what you are. "The gift without the giver is bare." No amount of
bountiful providing can atone for the loss of the father's personality.
It is easy for the hands to be so engrossed in providing that the home
is left headless and soon heartless. If we at all desire the fruits of
character in the home we must give ourselves personally.

It is not alone the habitue of the saloon or the idler in clubs and
fraternities who is guilty of stealing from the home its rightful share
of his presence. He who gives so much of himself to any object as not to
give the best of himself to his family comes under the apostolic ban of
being worse than an infidel. _A father belongs to his home more than he
belongs to his church._ There have been men, though probably their
number is not legion, who have allowed church duties, meetings, and
obligations so to absorb their time and energy that they have given only
a worn-out, burned-out, and useless fragment of themselves to their
children. Some have found it more attractive to talk of the heavenly
home in prayer-meeting or to be gracious to the stranger and to win the
smile of the neighbor at the church than to take up the by-no-means-easy
task of being godly, sympathetic and cheerful, courteous and kind among
their children and in their homes. No matter what it may be, church or
club, politics or reform organization, we are working at the wrong end
if we are allowing them to take precedence of the home.

Sec. 2. THE FATHER'S CHANCE