How many parents do this day after day and year after year, clinging to obsolete methods, trying to rule by worn-out precepts, all because--when you come to analyse it--their own sense of importance really matters to them more than their children's welfare, and no one has opened their eyes to see themselves and their actions in the true light. Although the case which I have just given of the seemingly good mother was drawn from the highest class, and so at first sight might not be said to apply to lesser grades, yet I want to show that this is not so, but that the same principle applies to the most modest little family. Every mother should study how best she can develop and elevate the souls which by her own part-action she has brought into being, and make that aim her first thought--for surely the satisfaction of the feeling that one has succeeded in training one's own children to high ideals and the attainment of happiness would be greater in old age than any gratification from the acquirement of social supremacy or realised personal ambitions. I would implore every mother, of any class, ruthlessly to reject all the rules which she has been taught for the guidance of her family, _unless she has proved with common sense that they can be profitably applied to each particular case_. I would ask her to keep to no transmitted axiom, _unless it comes up to the requirements of the ever-changing and ever-advancing day_. There is only one unchangeable and immutable command which we should follow, and this is that we should not soil our souls, or render them up to God degraded and smirched when we go hence upon that journey from whence no man returneth.