is to regard the
crisis as a revealer of truth, to use it as a valuable opportunity, one
in which moral qualities of acts are so easily evident, so keenly felt,
as to make it a time of spiritual quickening, a chance for the best sort
of training.

Sec. 1. THE PROMISE OF IMPERFECTION

The perfect child is the one unborn; shortly after his birth he begins
to take after his father. The perfect character does not exist in a
child. It is as unreasonable to expect it as it would be to look for the
perfect tree in the sapling. _Character comes by development_; it is not
born full-blown. Childhood implies promise, development. Therefore
parents must not be surprised at evidences that their children are
pretty much like their neighbors' children. Outside of the old-time
Sunday-school-library book the child who never lied, lost his temper,
sulked, or made a disturbance never existed and never will, except in a
psychopathic ward in some hospital. Could anything be sadder than the
picture of the anemic, pulseless automaton who is always "good"?

When parents speak of the "natural depravity" of their children, they
are commonly using terms they do not understand. What they mean is the
natural immaturity of their children, a condition of imperfection in
which they may rejoice, as it shows the possibility of development. The
child is in the world to grow to the fulness of all his powers. The
powers of the higher life are to develop as truly as those which we call
physical and mental. The family is the great human culture-bed for the
development of those powers, their training-field and school.

Does someone say, concerning a little child, "But we thought he had the
grace of God in his heart, that he had been born again and would no more
do wrong"? True, he may be born again, but there is a world of
difference between being born and being grown up. From one to the other,
in the realm of character, is a long and tedious process, with many a
stumble, many a fall, many a hard knock, and many a lesson to be
learned. Every moral crisis is part of the struggle, the experience and
training that may make toward the matured life. You have no more right
to expect your child to be a mature Christian than you had to expect him
to be born six feet tall.

A moral crisis is a lesson. The important consideration for the parent,
then, is to see the wrongdoing of the child as an experience in his
moral upward climb; not as a fall alone, but as p