s doing the very thing that he longed to do, realizing
the aspiration that had been unable to find words or form before. So the
life of action can be steadily trained by acts of kindness. Habits are
acts repeated until they pass from the volitional to the involuntary.
The only process we can follow is steadily to train the children in the
willing and doing of the right, the good, and the kindly deed, until it
becomes habitual. Let the child prepare the tray of delicacies, pack the
flowers we are sending, carry them over if possible, at least have a
share in all our ministries.[12]

The modern Sunday school recognizes the importance of activity in
forming religious character; therefore it plans and organizes social
activities for students to carry out.[13] The parents ought to know what
is designed for each child in his respective grade and to plan to
co-operate with the school. Where the family unites in the forms of
service suggested for the children, these activities lose all
perfunctoriness and take on a new reality. Social usefulness becomes a
normal part of life.

Do we remember the best times of our childhood? Were they not when we
were doing things? And were not the best of these best times when we
were doing the best things, those that seemed ideal, that gave us a
sense of helping someone or of putting into action the best of our
thoughts? That is the chance and the joy our children are longing for,
and that joy will be their strength.

Sec. 4. RELIGION IN SERVICE

The family has excellent opportunities for developing through its own
activities and duties the habits of the religious life. Children may
acquire through daily acts the habit of thinking of life as just the
chance to love and serve. Service may become perfectly normal to life.
Our modern paupers, whether they tramp the highways or ride in private
cars, came usually out of homes where the moral standard interpreted
life as just the chance of graft, to gain without giving, to have
without earning. Parental indulgence educates in pauperism. Let a boy
remain the passive beneficiary of all the advantages of a home until he
is sixteen or eighteen, and it will be exceedingly difficult to convert
him from the pauper habit.

The hard task before parents is to save their children from the snare of
passive luxury. Perhaps, remembering our toilsome youth, we seek to
shield them. It is a serious unkindness. It is a wrong to our world. The
religious mind i