=Principles, not Rules.=—‘God does not allow’ us to do thus and thus should be a rarely expressed but often present thought to parents who study the nature of the divine authority where it is most fully revealed, that is, in the Gospels. They see there that authority works by principles and not by rules, and as they themselves are the deputy authorities set over every household, it becomes them to consider the divine method of government. They should discern the signs of the times too; the tendency is to think that a man can only act according to his ‘lights,’ and, therefore, that it is right for him to do that which is right in his own eyes; in other words, that every man is his own final authority in questions of right and wrong. It is extremely important that parents should keep in view, and counteract if need be, this tendency of the day. =Limitations of Authority.=—On the other hand, it is well that they should understand the limitations of authority. Even the divine authority does not compel. It indicates the way and protects the way-farer, and strengthens and directs self-compelling power. It permits a man to make free choice of obedience rather than compels him to obey. In the moral training of children arbitrary action almost always produces revolt. Parents believe that they are doing well to _rule_ their households, without considering the pattern, the principles, and the limitations of parental authority. =Duty can exist only as that which we owe.=—An American writer on the moral instruction of children states that ‘it is the business of the moral instructor in the school to deliver to his pupils the subject-matter of morality, but not to deal with the sanctions of it.’ Here we have a contention at least two thousand years old. Socrates combated it as expressed in the formulæ:—‘Man is the measure of all things’; ‘Just as each thing appears to each man, so it is to him’; ‘All truth is relative.’ We say to-day that a man can but live up to his ‘lights’; in other words, there is no authority, no truth, and no law beyond what every man carries in his own bosom. The necessary issue of this teaching is the doctrine of the unknowable God—the God who, if He exists, does not exist for us, because we have no relations with Him. It is in their early years at home that children should be taught to realise that duty can exist only as that which we _owe_ to God; that the law of God is exceeding broad and encompasses us as the air we breathe, only more so, for it reaches to our secret thoughts; and this is not a hardship but a delight. That mothers should love their little children and make them happy all day long—this is part of the law of God: that children are glad when they are good, and sad when they are naughty—this, too, is the law of God: that, if Tommy drops his spoon, it falls to the ground, is a law of God too, of a different kind. Mother or teacher cannot give children a better inheritance than the constant sense