criticising, condemning, or excusing it, is quite
unfit to judge it at all. But there are
innumerable other instances, not the " cruel fathers"
or " heartless mothers" of fiction, but every-day,
well-meaning, respectable people, who are
nevertheless domestic Molochs, before whom every
successive child must pass through the fire;
ancient Remphans, requiring living human daily
sacrifices—precious indeed, for all sacrifice is
lovely in the offerer—but none the less an
unnecessary and cruel immolation, which lookers-on
must regard with both pity and righteous wrath.

In how many ways, ignorantly or carelessly,
do parents thus act as actual scourges to the
children who were given them, not for their
personal amusement, benefit, or pride, but for
the sake of the children themselves! How
entirely they seem to forget that each human soul
which is sent to them through the mysteries of
marriage and birth, is not their own to do as they
like with, but a solemn charge, for which they
will be accountable to God and man! If any
weaknesses of theirs, love of power, love of ease,
even love of love—often the deepest selfishness
of all—lead them to ignore this charge, woe be
to them and their children. " Unto the third
and fourth generation" is a law, not of divine
anger, but of divine inevitable necessity. One
wicked father, or vicious, vile-tempered mother,
often remains a family curse for a century.

It is at once the most awful responsibility, and
the utmost consecration of parenthood, that of
all human ties, this one requires most self-abnegation.
And when we think how very few really
unselfish people there are in the world—not
many among women, of men almost none—we
only wonder how so many decent folk do contrive
somehow to bring up decent families,—or let
them bring themselves up, as strange to say,
many excellent families often do. But the
very fact that children left almost entirely to
themselves sometimes turn out better than
those who have been subjected to the sharpest
parental oversight—only drives us back by
implication to the truth at which we started—how
few people are in the least fitted to be parents.

And perhaps no wonder. Young people
falling desperately in love, marrying in haste
and repenting at leisure; other people, not
young, and certainly guiltless of any youthful
follies, who commit the deliberate mature sin of
making marriage a mere matter of convenience;
husbands wearing out their bodies and souls in
the making of money, and wives frittering away
their helpless, aimless lives in the extravagant
spending of it—what can such as these know
or feel of the duties of parenthood?

At first it is a very pretty amusement, doubtless.
How delighted papa is to make after-
dinner pets of his fairy girls, and encourage the
obstreperousness of his fine manly boys. And
mamma, with a certain natural instinct that
rarely fails even in the silliest of women, is a
tolerably good mother so long as her children
remain in the nursery. But when they grow into
youths and maidens, requiring larger wisdom, a
tenderer guidance; when individual character
asserts itself, as it will and must, in any creature
worth becoming a man or a woman—then is the
crisis—most difficult and dangerous—at which,
alas, so many household histories break down.

The transition state of adolescence is a trying
time. The young folks, like all half-grown
animals, are awkward, unwise, self-conceited,
revolutionary; while the elders find it hard to believe
that " the children" are, in reality, children no
more; that characters have developed and tastes
matured, very likely most opposite to their
own, yet not necessarily inferior characters or
erring tastes. Some minds, at once strong and
narrow, find it nearly impossible to comprehend
this. They do not perceive when the time comes,
as come it must in every family, when it is the
children's right to begin to think and act for
themselves, and the parents' duty to allow them
to do it; when it is wisest gradually to slacken
authority, to sink " I command" into " I wish,"
to grant large freedom of opinion, and above all
in the expression of it. Likewise, and this is
a most important element in family union, to
give license, nay, actual sympathy, to wandering
affections, friendships, or loves, which, for the
time being, seem to find the home circle too
narrow and too dull.

No doubt, to the parents this is rather
trying. It is hard for mamma to discover
that her girl not only enjoys, but craves after, a
month's visit in some lively household; that she
likes the company of other girls, and forms
enthusiastic friendships, which mamma (a lady of
between fifty and sixty) forgets that she herself
ever had, and consequently thinks exceedingly
silly, or idle, or wrong. Papa, too, cannot
see why his boys—good, affectionate lads—
should find it such dull work to stay at home of
an evening, or should prefer a sensation play—
"so different from what the stage was in my
time"—to the longest game of chess with
himself, or the most learned conversation with his
staid and sober friends. Yet all this is quite
natural; the boys and girls are foolish, perhaps,
but not in the least guilty. Well for the household
in which this, the earliest of many impending
changes, should be recognised at once,
still better that the recognition should come
first from the elder and wiser side of it.

But, alas, here intrudes a truth which should
be touched reverently and delicately, and yet it
cannot be passed over, for it is a truth—that all
parents are not wiser than their children.
Sometimes a boy, quick-witted, honest, and good,
finds, as he grows up, that his father is not a
man to be relied on, but one of those weak souls
who, without positive harm in them, are ever
sinking lower and lower, and dragging their
family down with them—whose authority is a
mere name, whose advice is fatal to follow.
Many a clever lad has come to see, even before
he is out of his teens, that his only chance of
getting on in the world is to rely solely on
himself, and give as wide a berth as possible
to his natural guardian and guide—his father.
Likewise, many a girl, generous, warm-hearted,
and sensitive, on passing into discriminating