it by." Some lay themselves open to _Punch's_ attack,
when he depicts a girl saying, "Mamma has become quite blind now, and papa
is paralytic, and it makes the house so dull that I'm going to be a
hospital nurse."

Many who are too clear-sighted to neglect home duties, yet leave this
difficulty unfaced, in that they look for all the pleasure of their life
outside home, and within that home allow themselves to live in an
atmosphere of friction and peevishness. The girl who does that has left
the riddle of home life unsolved: she was meant to wrestle with that
difficulty till she wrung from it the blessing, the peace which comes only
from self-conquest and acceptance of all the circumstances of her life.

Have any of you the lurking thought, "I was born by no choice of my own:
those who brought me into the world owe duty to me, not I to them?" I have
known some say this, and I have known many act as if they thought it, and
I have known some who felt as if God had better work for them to do
outside home, and have either gone off to do it, or have chafed against
life because they could not go. It does seem to me that the present very
general eclipse of the old Roman virtue of filial piety lies at the root
of much of the unsound work, and of the undone work, of the present day.

Know your own work, and do it. What is your work on leaving school? Is it
not to learn to fit into your home? At school, when you got your remove,
your duty was to get into the work of the new form, and to do it. You have
now been moved to higher and far more difficult work than any sixth form,
you are in the school of home. Are you learning its lessons, or are you
fretting for a remove? It may be you find life so easy and pleasant at
home that you feel any talk of its difficulties does not apply to you; it
is all play so far. But I know so many who feel this friction on leaving
school, that I am sure it must be the case with some of you.

If any here fail to feel the debt they owe at home--the debt which God
enforced as next to the debt owed to Himself--let me remind them that the
whole instinct of mankind has responded to the appeal of parents; filial
piety has always been reverenced and held beautiful, and the hereditary
sense of mankind must be taken into account in deciding what is, or is
not, a virtue. But supposing I granted, for the sake of argument, that the
original debt was on your parents' side and not on yours, what then? You
remain a