into their true selves now fully
understandable by these men and women.

But the family life must make provision for the wider friendships of
youth. Somewhere this insatiable appetite for the reality of lives will
feed. Groups of friends your young man and woman will find somewhere. If
they cannot bring them into your home they will go elsewhere. You can
scarce pay any price too high for the opportunity that comes when they
are perfectly free to have their friends with them and with you, when
home becomes the natural place of the social meetings of youth. If you
are afraid of the wear on the furniture you may keep your furniture, but
you will lose a life or lives. Here is the opportunity of the home to
enter a wider ministry, to be a place of the joy of friendships to many
lives.

Sec. 4. AT THE DOOR OF A NEW WORLD

As through friendships the youth enters and explores this wonderful
realm of personality he will find some persons more wonderful than
others. Those instincts of which he is largely unconscious will impel
him to make a selection. The same law is operative with the young woman.
Mating is normally always first on the higher levels of personalities;
it first calls itself friendship, nor does it think farther. But father
and mother, if they have the least spiritual vision, stand in awe as
they see their children taking their first evident steps toward
home-making. What an opportunity is theirs!

Yet here, as the home faces its duty toward a family yet to be, is just
where some of the most serious mistakes are made. This is no time for
teasing and jesting, still less for mocking ridicule. If you treat this
essentially sacred step as a joke it will not be strange if the young
people follow suit and take marriage as a yet larger joke. The home is
the place where the home is treated most irreverently. Of course one
must not take too seriously those "calf" courtships, prematurely
fostered by boys and girls, under the pressure of the high-school
tendency to anticipate all of life's riper experiences. But even here
jesting and teasing will only tend to confirm and make permanent what
would be but a temporary aberration. In that case either silence or
kindly, simple advice will help most of all.

To young people who think at all courtship has its times of vision, when
they stand trembling before the unknown future, when they, with youth's
idealism, make high vows and stand on high places. Give them at least
the