off a fraudulent company without costs, and who makes his money not by
his "practices," but by his honest practice; the man of science who
reverently devotes himself, as the servant of the truth, to "think God's
thoughts after Him," in the words of Kepler's prayer, and establish the
kingdom of law and order, in the humbleness of conscious limitation
which forbids dogmatizing; the artist who is true to his art and does
not subordinate the laws of the eternal Loveliness to the shifting laws
of the temporary market; the capitalist who looks upon himself as the
steward of the public good, and to whom material gain is the means and
not the end; the workman who does good work for the kingdom of God's
sake, knowing that every stroke of good work is a brick in the palace
of the great King, and who scorns to scamp because it pays; and,
generally speaking, every man who is so intent on helping and serving
others that his thoughts are taken off himself and centred on
another--these are the men who are seeking first a kingdom of God,
wherein dwelleth righteousness; these are the men who, living in the
higher life can rule the lower--the men whose feet are in the lilies,
and to whom the floods of earthly passion, even when they beat hardest,
end in the flight of a dove and in a triumphal arch of light.

Now, you will see at once the intensely practical bearing of this
teaching on the training of your boys. You are not called to hit down
directly on the evil, to give warnings against vice, or to speak on
things which your womanhood unspeakably shrinks from mentioning. What
you are called to do is to secure, so far as you can, that the mind and
soul moves on its own proper plane. It is more an attitude you have to
form than a warning you have to give. And here it is that the imperative
need of high positive teaching comes in. Till parents, and especially
mothers, recognize their God-given functions as the moral teachers of
their own children, till they cease to shunt off their responsibilities
on the professional shoulders of the schoolmaster, we had better frankly
give up the whole question in despair. Strange and sad it seems to me
that at the end of the nineteenth century after the coming of our Lord
I should have to plead that the moral law is possible under every
condition to any man, and that parents are _ipso facto_ the moral
teachers of their own children. And yet it is the denial, tacit or
explicit, of these two primary trut