In the need for one day, free from the things that hinder and devoted to the life of the spirit, the home finds the guiding principle for the use of the day; all members are to be trained to use it as a glorious opportunity, a welcome period, a day of the best things of life. It is devoted to personality, to man's rights as a religious being. Surely one of the best things of life will be that we shall meet one another, shall look into faces of friends and companions! And this opportunity of social mingling is lifted to a high level when it is an act of the larger family life, the life that brings God and man into one family. That is what the church meeting and service ought to be: our Father's larger family getting together on the day of the life that makes them one. For the child the church school and the children's service of worship are their immediate points of vital touch with the church family. If we think of the day as affording us the pleasure of social mingling with friends and members of that family, Sunday morning will cease to be a period of unwilling observance of empty duties. Of course that will depend, too, on the measure in which the church and school grasp their opportunity to make this the best of days.[31] Further, let the home keep this day as the one of personal values all the way through, sacred to that life of love, friendship, and joy in the presence of one another which is the essential life of the family. It has always been a good custom for friends to visit on this day, for families grown up and established around their own hearths to gather again for a few hours. It is the day when we have time to discover how much greater are the riches of friendship than aught besides, when, looking into the eyes of those we love, we see "the light that never was on sea or land," the ultimate good! The hours of being together are the hours of real education. Children cannot be with good and great people and remain the same. Their lives need other lives. Above all, they need us. This should be the day for real mothering and fathering. Nothing ought to be permitted to interfere with this, neither our social pleasures nor the demands of the church. § 3. THE PROBLEM OF PLAY What shall we do with the child who wants to play on Sunday? Is there any other kind of child? They all want to. It is as natural for a child to play as it is for a man to rest; it is as necessary. A child is a growing person learning life by play. Because play seems trivial to us we assume it is so to them; we would banish the trivial from the day devoted to the higher life. In some families play is forbidden because children find pleasure in it, and adults find it impossible to associate piety and pleasure.