Fatherhood is our chance to become. It is our chance to grow into our finest selves. The measure of its gains to us depends upon the measure of our gifts to its opportunities and duties. It is our chance to be what we should like our children to be, our chance to find ourselves. All that it costs, all the self-denial, labor, and often pain it must mean, is just the process of developing a fine, rich life. Now, that life is just the greatest gift that any man can make to his home and his world. We can never give any more than ourselves or any other than ourselves, and this pathway of sacrifice, this costly way of home-making, is a man's chance to become Godlike. The race has come upward in this way. It needs the masculine in its ideal self as well as the feminine. There is no race salvation without constant individual self-giving. That self-giving must be balanced equally on the part of the man and the woman. Fatherhood, like motherhood, is just our chance to learn life's best lesson, that there is a certain short path to happiness which men have called the way of pain and God calls the way of peace. Motherhood is a sacred portion, but so is fatherhood. Its calls are just as high, its service just as holy, its opportunities just as large, its meaning just as divine. How worse than empty are all our pratings about divine fatherhood if we illustrate its meaning only degradingly or misleadingly! And just as the life of the spirit is the gift of that divine fatherhood, so for us the gift of our lives, ourselves, is the largest and richest contribution we can make to the religious lives of our children. The father as a teacher teaches by what he is. The classes in the home have no set lessons, for the text is written in lives and the word is spoken and taught in personality. You effect the religious education of your children in the degree that you give yourself as a simple religious person to them. I. References for Study Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. vii. Appleton, $1.50. K.G. Busby, _Home Life in America_, chaps. i, ii. Macmillan, $2.00. II. Further Reading E.A. Abbott, _On the Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00. Allen, _Making the Most of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg, $1.00 each. Wilm, _The Culture of Religion_, chap. ii. Pilgrim Press, $0.75 III. Topics for Discussion 1. Which do you remember best, your teachers or your lessons? Why? 2. Describe, from your memory, some of the influences of personality? 3. Are these influences greater or less with parents on children? 4. What are the causes that separate parents and children? 5. How shall we define duties to business, to society, and to the family? 6. Under what circumstances is one justified in refusing time to the church for the sake of the family?