[Sidenote: The Office of Christian Parents.] There exists a treatise printed by Cantrell Legge, printer to the University of Cambridge, in the year 1616, with the title “The Office of Christian Parents, showing how Children are to be governed throughout all ages and times of their life. With a brief Admonitorie addition unto children to answer in dutie to their Parents’ office.” [Sidenote: Personal Care of the Mother.] [Sidenote: Possible Extinction of Boarding Schools.] The writer, whoever he may have been, appears to have at that very early date grasped the importance of his subject, for he says, “The Parent is put in trust to governe the chiefest creature under heaven, to train up that which is called the Generation of God.” Being thus impressed with the value of children, it is natural to find the author of the treatise giving advice that is being more and more strongly urged upon parents at the present day. Eminent doctors insist upon the advantage to infants of being personally cared for by the mother, and not handed over wholesale to a nurse. Educational experts are more and more inclined to take the view that children should be kept at home as long as possible. So far, indeed, has this theory advanced that there is a suggestion of the ultimate extinction of our great public boarding schools in favour of a larger number of schools so situated that children may attend them as day scholars while still living at home under parental care and influence. [Sidenote: Interference of the Grandmother.] The old writer of 1616 made a strong point of the child being cared for by its parents from birth onwards. He (possibly from personal experience) did not even approve of the interference of the grandmother, for he quaintly observes, “In some places there comes in the child-wive’s mother. She will not have her daughter troubled with the noursing: and the Father cannot abide the crying of the child: therefore a nurse is sent for in all hast”—a course of action of which he entirely disapproves. When the child is a little older he still thinks that its committal to the care of a servant should be avoided. “When a child beginneth to know his mother from another, there groweth two absurdities, either the mother’s fondness maketh it a crying child and restless, or els her careless committing it to a servant spills it.” [Sidenote: The Spoiling of Children.]