hat parental influence, to
be permanent, requires that the family should be hedged about with high
barriers and that the father he endowed with political and religious
authority. He can then exercise the immense influence due to all
tradition, which he represents, and all law, which he administers; but
it is not his bare instincts as a father that give him this ascendency.
It is a social system that has delegated to him most of its functions,
so that all authority flows through him, and he retails justice and
knowledge, besides holding all wealth in his hand. When the father,
apart from these official prerogatives, is eager and able to mould his
children's minds, a new relation half natural and half ideal, which is
friendship, springs up between father and son. In this ties of blood
merely furnish the opportunity, and what chiefly counts is a moral
impulse, on the one side, to beget children in the spirit, and on the
other a youthful hunger for experience and ideas.

[Sidenote: Handing on the torch of life.]

If _Nunc dimittis_ is a psalm for love to sing, it is even more
appropriate for parental piety. On seeing heirs and representatives of
ours already in the world, we are inclined to give them place and trust
them to realise our foiled ambitions. They, we fancy, will be more
fortunate than we; we shall have screened them from whatever has most
maimed our own lives. Their purer souls, as we imagine, will reach
better things than are now possible to ours, distracted and abused so
long. We commit the blotted manuscript of our lives more willingly to
the flames, when we find the immortal text already half engrossed in a
fairer copy. In all this there is undoubtedly a measure of illusion,
since little clear improvement is ordinarily possible in the world, and
while our children may improve upon us in some respects, the devil will
catch them unprepared in another quarter. Yet the hope in question is a
transcript of primary impersonal functions to which nature, at certain
levels, limits the animal will. To keep life going was, in the
beginning, the sole triumph of life. Even when nothing but reproduction
was aimed at or attained, existence was made possible and ideally stable
by securing so much; and when the ideal was enlarged so as to include
training and rearing the new generation, life was even better intrenched
and protected. Though further material progress may not be made easier
by this development, since more dange