so fast that a man has
to be alert, thinking and trying to understand and sympathize all the
time. The boy sees through all sleepy pretenses of understanding. We
keep the open door of confidence only as by steady endeavor we keep in
real touch with the boy's world.

Fathers are ignorant of the problems of family training; they oscillate
between the wishy-washy sentimentality that permits anarchy in the home
and the harsh, unthinking despotism that breeds hatred and rebellion.
Fathers criticize the public schools but never take the time to go and
look inside one. They laugh at women's clubs because they are too lazy
to make a like investment in the patient study of some of their
problems. They affect indifference to the parent-teacher clubs while
remaining ignorant of the significant things they have already
accomplished for the schools. If we were to make an inventory of what
the women, the mothers, have accomplished by study, agitation, and
legislation for social, civic, ethical, and religious betterment, we
proud lords of creation would, or ought to, hang our heads in shame.

Fatherhood is our chance to become. It is our chance to grow into our
finest selves. The measure of its gains to us depends upon the measure
of our gifts to its opportunities and duties. It is our chance to be
what we should like our children to be, our chance to find ourselves.
All that it costs, all the self-denial, labor, and often pain it must
mean, is just the process of developing a fine, rich life. Now, that
life is just the greatest gift that any man can make to his home and his
world. We can never give any more than ourselves or any other than
ourselves, and this pathway of sacrifice, this costly way of
home-making, is a man's chance to become Godlike. The race has come
upward in this way. It needs the masculine in its ideal self as well as
the feminine. There is no race salvation without constant individual
self-giving. That self-giving must be balanced equally on the part of
the man and the woman. Fatherhood, like motherhood, is just our chance
to learn life's best lesson, that there is a certain short path to
happiness which men have called the way of pain and God calls the way of
peace.

Motherhood is a sacred portion, but so is fatherhood. Its calls are just
as high, its service just as holy, its opportunities just as large, its
meaning just as divine. How worse than empty are all our pratings about
divine fatherhood if we illust