reat hereafter to
centre them upon the little lad who stands at his bedside. His hands
wander over the golden head with

"'The vast sad tenderness of dying men.'

He triumphs over pain and weakness that he may plot and plan every
detail of the young life which he can no longer live to guide and
direct. And when at length he seems to have passed into the last
darkness, and they hold up the child to see if he will yet recognize
him, suddenly the spirit seems to sweep back again over the dark river
which it has almost crossed, and an ineffable light illumines the dying
face as his lips meet the lips of his little son in one last supreme
kiss--the father's love for one moment vanquishing death itself. And
what, I ask," said the preacher, in tones that thrilled that vast
audience, "must be the sin of desecrating and defiling such a function
as this, this function of fatherhood in which man seems to touch upon
God Himself and become the representative of the Father in heaven--what
must be the guilt of turning it into a subject of filthy jests and a
source of unclean actions?"

The friend with whom I was staying had brought with her her Bible class
of Industrial School lads, and when the next day she asked what had
struck them most in the sermon, they answered promptly, "What he said
about fathers," Let us go and teach likewise.

But perhaps the most precious sphere of influence is that which comes to
a mother last and latest of all--too late, unless the moral training of
all preceding years has been made one long disciplinary preparation in
self-mastery and pureness of living, for the higher and more difficult
self-control, the far sterner discipline, of true marriage pure and
undefiled. But if through her training and influence "the white flower
of a blameless life" has been worn

"Through all the years of passion in the blood,"

then this is the time when her long patient sowing comes to its golden
fruitage. It is to his mother that a young man turns as his confidant in
his engagement; it is to her that he necessarily turns for counsel and
advice with regard to his young wife in the early years of his marriage.
A young man in love is a man who can receive divine truth even of the
hardest, for love is of God, and its very nature is self-giving.

"Love took up the harp of life, and smote upon its chords with might--
Smote the chord of self, that trembling passed in music out of sight."

A pure affecti