Your Heavenly Father will never forsake you, your brothers in the Kingdom will never betray you; but the fathers and the brothers of earthly life might become your assassins. “And ye shall be betrayed both by parents and brethren and kinsfolks and friends; and some of you shall they cause to be put to death.” And yet fathers at least should be faithful, because, according to Jesus, fathers have more duties toward their sons than sons toward their fathers. The Old Law recognizes only the first. “Honor thy father and thy mother,” said Moses. But he does not add, “Protect and love thy children.” Children seemed to Moses to be the property of those who had begotten them. Life in those times seemed so fair and precious that children were always thought to be in debt to their parents. They were to remain servants forever, everlastingly submissive. They should live only for old age, by the orders of old age. Here also the divine genius of the Overthrower sees what is lacking in the old ideals and insists upon righting the balance. Fathers should give without sparing and without rest; even if the children are ungrateful, even if they abandon their father, even if they are unworthy in the eyes of the platitudinous sagacity of the world. The Paternoster is a prayer of sons to a Father. It is the prayer which every child might address to his father. He asks for daily bread; the remission of sins, pardon for his failings, and daily protection against evil. And yet fathers, even when they give everything, are sometimes forsaken. If their sons leave them to throw themselves into evil ways, they must be forgiven as soon as they come back, as the Prodigal Son in the parable was forgiven. If they leave their fathers to seek out a higher and more perfect life—like those who are converted to the Kingdom—they will be rewarded a thousand times in this life and the next. But from every point of view, fathers are debtors. The tremendous responsibility which they have accepted in giving life to a new human being must be met. Like the Heavenly Father, they must give to those of their children who ask and to those who keep silence, to the worthy and the unworthy, to those who sit about the family board and to those who are wanderers over the earth, to the good and to the bad, to the first and to the last. They must never become weary, not even with the children who flee from them, with those who offend against them, with those who deny them. “Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?” Who will refuse to a son who departs asking nothing, the supreme gift of a love which asks no requital? LITTLE CHILDREN