We may endeavor to put the best into others _directly_. A parent is a parent largely for this particular purpose. The father and mother have this end as their greatest and highest responsibility. They cannot shirk it without hurt to themselves and to their child. No one can and no one should influence a child as directly as does a parent. The parent may temporarily place the child beneath the influence of a nurse, a pastor, or a teacher, but the abiding influence should be and is the parent's. Little by little, line upon line, precept upon precept, conduct upon conduct, the parent should endeavor to set before the child the highest ideas of life. Skill is requisite in stating these ideas, in illustrating them, in making them attractive, in persuading to their acceptance. The evil or the inferior lodged in the child's heart needs to be forced out, that the best may enter. Happy the parent whose forcing process is like the incoming of light into a darkened room, a process that is gentle and conciliatory, a process that never boasts of victory and never leaves a pain. This is the parent's greatest hope and greatest reward, to have a child who shall in the child's own time and place be an advancer of the world's good. A thousand spheres of opportunity open before each new generation. Into any one of them the child may carry the best his father or mother ever thought or said. Many parents wish their children to do in life work of the very same type that they once did. It was therefore a gratification to their ministerial fathers when they saw their own sons enter the ministry, Henry Ward Beecher, Jonathan Edwards, Frederick W. Farrar, Charles H. Spurgeon, John Wesley, and Reginald Heber. But other ministerial fathers likewise might be gratified when they saw their sons helpfully laboring in noble spheres not specifically "the ministry," as in poetry, Joseph Addison, Samuel T. Coleridge, William Cowper, Ben Jonson, Oliver Goldsmith, Alfred Tennyson, James Russell Lowell, Oliver W. Holmes, John Keble, and James Montgomery; as in literature, Matthew Arnold, Bancroft, Froude, Hallam, and Parkman; as in art, Joshua Reynolds and Christopher Wren; as in law, Lord Ellenborough, Stephen J. Field, David J. Brewer, David Dudley Field; as in statesmanship, Henry Clay, Edward Everett, Sir William Harcourt, John B. Balfour, and William Forster; and as in invention, Samuel F. B. Morse.