ily influence. If the family does not
make good citizens we cannot have good citizens. The family too is at
the basis of organised religious life; if the family does not make good
Christians we shall not have good Christians. The Sunday School and the
Church societies are poor substitutes for the religious influence of the
family, as the school and the camp are for its social interests.

One is inclined to stress the obvious failure of the family to fulfil
its alloted functions in the teaching of religion as the root difficulty
that the Christian religion has to encounter and the most comprehensive
cause of its relative failure in modern life. The responsibility for the
religious and moral training of children rests squarely upon those who
have assumed the responsibility of bringing them into the world, and it
cannot be rightly pushed off on to some one else. To the protest of
parents that they are incompetent to conduct such training, the only
possible reply is a blunt, "Whose fault is that?" If you have been so
careless of the fundamental responsibilities of life, you are
incompetent to assume a relation which of necessity carries such
responsibility with it. It is no light matter to have committed to you
the care of an immortal soul whose eternal future may quite well be
conditioned on the way in which you fulfil your trust. It would be well
as a preliminary to marriage to take a little of the time ordinarily
given to its frivolous accompaniments and seriously meditate upon the
words of our Lord which seem wholly appropriate to the circumstance:
"Whoso shall cause to stumble one of these little ones which believe in
me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck,
and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea." It is the careless
and incompetent training of children which in fact "causes them to
stumble" when the presence of word and example would have held them
straight. It has been (to speak personally) the greatest trial of my
priesthood that out of the thousands of children I have dealt with, in
only rare cases have I had the entire support of the family; and I have
always considered that I was fortunate when I met with no interference
and was given an indifferent tolerance. It is heart-breaking to see
years of careful work brought to naught (so far as the human eye can
see: the divine eye can see deeper) by the brutal materialism of a
father and the silly worldliness of a mother.

The