=Sowing wild oats.=--If girls were addicted to loafing on the streets, swearing and telling vulgar stories, smoking and drinking, gambling and going to questionable places, we should not consider this good training for wifehood and motherhood. No intelligent man would choose such a girl to be the wife of his bosom, the queen of his home, the mother of his children. He is an ardent believer in the training of girls before marriage for wifehood and motherhood. Boys who engage in any of these sins are as much unfitting themselves for parentage as girls would be. “Oh, but a reformed rake makes the best husband.” If he makes the shadow of one, it will be a miracle of grace that he does it. No “rake” can in his own strength make a good father. If by God’s help he makes a good husband and father, this will be done in spite of his former life, and, not because he had been a “rake.” Sowing wild oats in youth does not make it easier to be good in after life, but more difficult. Boys and young men should live with a view to husbandhood and fatherhood. =Immature parents.=--Experienced stock raisers will not breed inferior or immature stock. If one or both animals to be used for breeding purposes be young, immature, the offspring will be inferior. All leading physiologists place man’s maturity at about twenty-four and a woman’s at about twenty. If continence in thought and life controlled our social relations, it would be best for the human family if marriage did not take place until maturity. Under existing social conditions, sexual dissipation, and its dangers, it is perhaps best, in some cases, that they marry a few years younger. But for fifteen-and sixteen-year-old girls and nineteen-and twenty-year-old boys to marry is a decided physiological and psychological mistake. Children can no more parent normal children than can pigs, colts, and kids parent normal young. A great sociologist says that four to six per cent. more children whose mothers married at sixteen will die in their first year than among children whose mothers married at twenty; and that six to ten per cent. more children whose fathers married at twenty will die in their first year than among children whose fathers married at twenty-four. =An ideal family.=--At the close of a lecture on heredity in a college town, a gentleman invited me to take dinner at his home the next day. I accepted his invitation. From eleven o’clock to twelve he and I sat in front of his little cottage home chatting pleasantly. When the college bell announced the noon hour, he turned and said, “When my two boys and my girl return home for dinner I want you to study them as examples of intelligently applied laws of parental preparation, prenatal training, good environment and the Grace of God.”