I can never forget a scene I witnessed many years ago. Shortly after the passing of his father, a son entered the death chamber, shook his fist in the face of his dead father and exclaimed with tearless and yet heartbreaking grief: "You are responsible for the ruin of my life." Later I learned that the father was a mere accumulator of money who had believed every paternal duty to have been fulfilled because he gave and planned to bequeath possessions to his children. Multitudes of parents there are who during their lifetime should be made conscious of the lives they are suffering to go to wreck, theirs the major responsibility. Happily for some parents, most children who survey the ruin of their lives fail to fix the responsibility where it properly belongs,--in parental neglect of the obligation to bring to children moral stimulus and spiritual guidance. But the important thing for parents is not to guard their speech lest children overhear them but to guard their souls that children be free to see all. If Emerson was right with respect to a man's character uttering itself in every word he speaks, this is truest of all within the microcosm of the home, wherein children are relentlessly attentive to parental speech and silence alike, pitiless assessors of omission as well as commission. What parents are, not what they would have themselves imagined to be by children, shines through every word and act, however scrupulous be parental vigilance over speech and conduct. It may be very important for parents to be watchful of their tongues as they are rather frequently urged to be. But it is rather more imperative to be watchful over their lives. We are tempted to forget that parental duties are positive as well as negative, that it is not enough for parents not to hurt a child, not to do injury to his moral and spiritual well-being. For of all beings parents must, paraphrasing the word of the German poet, be aggressively and resistlessly good, pervasively beneficent, throughout their contact with a child. It is a problem whether it be more necessary to counsel children to honor parents or to bid parents be deserving as far as they may be of the honor of children. Years ago a great teacher of the nation pleaded as men commonly plead for reverence and honor on the part of children toward parents. But in truth we have no right to plead for reverence filial unless to that plea there be added solemn entreaty to the elders to make it possible for the young to do them reverence and honor. When we, the elders of this day, bemoan the want of unity between our children and ourselves, let us not be so sure of our children's unworthiness but rather ask ourselves whether we are worthy of that which our parents enjoyed at our hands, the reverence and honor which must needs underlie unity in the home.