=Parental responsibility.=--Parents are not only responsible for the number of children born in the home, whether few or many, close together or far apart, but they are also largely responsible for their children’s being born with strong or weak constitutions, brilliant or stupid minds, good or bad tendencies. When this responsibility is more fully understood by parents, their children will be better born. The greatest blessing parents can bequeath to their children is not wealth, but a good heredity. A very large part of a child’s training, good or bad, is prenatal. Right from birth, before environment has had time to influence the child, examples of children who are easily trained, and cases that are trained with the greatest difficulty, are perfectly familiar to all of us. =Environment is fully as potential in a child’s life as is heredity.=--A child may receive the most unfavorable heredity, and good environment may lead the child to become much superior to his parents, brothers and sisters. Again, a child may receive the very best heredity, and a bad environment may lead him to mental neglect and moral disaster. Parents can determine largely the heredity of the child; but they can furnish only a small part of a child’s environment. Unknown to the parents, a playmate, a neighbor, a servant, in a few words or a single act, may give a child an impulse toward vice that may lead the child into years of sin. The real cause of the child’s going wrong may ever remain unknown to the parents. =Value of early environment.=--The total of a child’s environment is furnished by the whole of society. Fortunately, parents have largely the control of the first years of a child’s environment. Unfortunately, most parents have tried to safeguard the virtue of their children by keeping them ignorant of everything pertaining to their sex natures. Just here parents have often failed because of their false idea of good environment. Ignorance of the sex nature is not a safeguard. Children are often engaging in sexual sins months or years before the parents dream of danger. Many servants employed in and about the home are impure in mind or practice or both; often they are sex perverts. They take a fiendish delight in teaching vice to even a small child. Parents cannot be too careful in the selection of servants. They should have the most positive understanding that no profanity, obscenity or vice is to be engaged in by the servant. Sexual vice is the most common and dangerous vice of childhood. It always leads to other forms of wrong-doing. Proper sex instruction, given by the parents at the right time and in the right way, is the only sane safeguard to the virtue of childhood. =Heredity, environment, Christ.=--A bad environment may lead a child of good heredity for a number of years into vice and sin; but the inherent good tendencies often assert themselves and help the prodigal to return.