To widen this all too narrow conception of our responsibilities, the following reflections may be found useful. A father in the last decade of his life realizes acutely the brevity of his own past existence. The curve of his life is now rapidly descending. Supposing him to be nearing seventy, his adult sons and daughters may by this time have reached the age of thirty or forty. Looking back on the thirty or more years that separate him from them, and remembering how like a dream the intervening years have glided by, it may come home to him with sudden force how soon these, his sons and daughters too, though now in their prime, will reach the point at which he has arrived. The error of parents is to think of their grown sons and daughters only as moving on the upward curve of life. They stop short in imagination there. They look forward to marriage, vocational success and the like, as finalities for those who are still young. We ought to remember that the upward curve in the lives of our children will presently descend just as ours has descended, that the few decades which separate them from old age will pass as quickly for them as they have passed for us,—almost in the twinkling of an eye,—and we ought to ask on their behalf as we must on ours,—What is to be the result of it all? What does it all profit? And it is this thought that will turn our attention for them as for ourselves to the spiritual end which should be dominant at all times,—in the morning, at noon, and in the evening twilight of a human existence.