life, but because no successes without save
from utterly tragic failure him who has failed within the home!

Home may be heavenly in its harmonies or hellish in its discords. To
maintain that the difference is the result of love or lovelessness in
the home does not tell the whole story. Whether home is to be heaven
or hell, wracked by discord or attuned to harmony, depends upon them
that make it, all of them, yea, upon the all of all that make a home.
One alone may mar a home, any one of its members, husband or wife,
parent or child, brother or sister, though all together are needed to
minister to its perfection.

And how are the harmonies to be achieved and the discords to be
avoided? And the answer is,--through courtesy, consideration,
comradeship,--all in turn, alike in the major and minor issues of
life, going back to self-rule not self-will. Courtesy and
consideration together constitute the chivalry of the home, courtesy
its outer token, consideration its inner prompting. The chivalry of
the home is a reminder, occasionally required by both parents and
children, that courtesy is not a grace if reserved for and bestowed
solely upon strangers. The man or child, who is a churl at home and
limits his courtesy extra-murally, is not only a pitiable boor but a
contemptible hypocrite.

And consideration is something more than courtesy, for the latter
springs from it as both are rooted in the sympathy which is the _origo
et fons_ of comradeship. Consideration like an angel comes, moving the
family members to think with and for others, not of themselves as
pitilessly misunderstood but as capable of understanding others
because possessed of the will to understand.

But there can be neither outward courtesy nor inmost consideration,
least of all comradeship, unless there be the grace of avoidance of
those temptations to selfishness, which more than all else blight the
home by leading to conflict irrepressible and irreconcilable.
Unselfishness in its higher or lower sense is the _conditio sine qua
non_ of the parental-filial relation, even as selfishness is deadly
not only to those who are guilty of it but to those who needlessly
endure it. For selfishness it is which more than all else converts the
home into a prison, even a dungeon. Parents have the right to ask of
children that they shall avoid the besetting sin of childhood, namely,
selfishness, though usually the guilt of filial selfishness rests upon
the head of par