children's welfare, and no one
has opened their eyes to see themselves and their actions in the true
light.

Although the case which I have just given of the seemingly good mother
was drawn from the highest class, and so at first sight might not be
said to apply to lesser grades, yet I want to show that this is not
so, but that the same principle applies to the most modest little
family.

Every mother should study how best she can develop and elevate the
souls which by her own part-action she has brought into being, and
make that aim her first thought--for surely the satisfaction of the
feeling that one has succeeded in training one's own children to high
ideals and the attainment of happiness would be greater in old age
than any gratification from the acquirement of social supremacy or
realised personal ambitions.

I would implore every mother, of any class, ruthlessly to reject all
the rules which she has been taught for the guidance of her family,
_unless she has proved with common sense that they can be profitably
applied to each particular case_. I would ask her to keep to no
transmitted axiom, _unless it comes up to the requirements of the
ever-changing and ever-advancing day_. There is only one unchangeable
and immutable command which we should follow, and this is that we
should not soil our souls, or render them up to God degraded and
smirched when we go hence upon that journey from whence no man
returneth.

In summing up both my articles upon the responsibility of motherhood,
I find that in this second one I have made two statements which might
read as contradictions. Firstly, I spoke of young people requiring
personal gain to be held out to them as a reason for committing, or
refraining from committing, certain actions; and then, a paragraph or
two afterwards, I gave the illustration of the little girls' good
behaviour to their mother as being only caused by the fact that it was
more to their advantage so to behave. What I meant to show was that
while boys are young and full of the rising impulses of nature they
very rarely can have acquired sufficient spiritual belief to make them
refrain from indulging in certain pleasures--or what seem pleasures to
them--merely because they have been told these pleasures are wrong.
For instance, on the subject of smoking. What boy will stop smoking by
being told it is wrong and that he is sinning by his disobedience? But
there are many intelligent ones who will not i