d. See that at hand there are the
songs and essays of the idealists. Give them Emerson and forget your
Nietzsche. Renew your own youth. Get some of Isaiah's passion and let it
breathe its fervor on them. Feed by poem, song, story, essay, and
conversation the life of ideals.

Stop long enough to see the life that like an engine with steam up is
surely going somewhere and help it to find an engineer. We call this the
period of sowing wild oats. Wild oats are simply energies invested in
the wrong places. The dynamic of youth must go somewhere and do
something. Fundamentally it would rather go to the good than the bad. We
know that this was true of us at that time; why should we assume less of
others? Hold to your faith in youth. Fathers who with open eyes and
active minds--not with sleepy fatalism--believe in their boys, have boys
who believe in them.

They wait for leadership. If you have dropped into the easy slippers of
indifference to social reform and other types of ideal service, get
back into the fight again beside this new man of yours.

They wait for friendship in this matter of their ideals and their
service. At any cost keep open house of the heart.

They wait for a life-task. This is the period of vocational choice. It
will make a tremendous difference to this life whether his work shall be
merely a matter of making a living or shall be his chance to invest life
in accordance with his new ideals. Shall he go out to be merely one of
the many wage-earners or salary-winners to whom life is a great orange
from which he will get all the juice if he can, regardless of who else
goes thirsty? Or shall he see an occupation as his chance to pay back to
today and tomorrow that which he owes to yesterday? as his chance to
give the world himself? He need not be a minister or a missionary to
make his life a ministry; he will find life, he will be a religious
person in no other way than as his dominating motive shall be to find
the fulness of life in order to have a full life to give to God's world.
The answer will depend on what life means to you, how you are
interpreting it, and how you aid him in thinking of it and making his
high choice. You will have abundant opportunity to show what it is to
you--as you have been doing all along--by your daily attitude; you will
have abundant opportunity to talk it all over, for he will certainly
discuss his trade or profession with you. The family must give to the
life of the new d