itself in over-ripe sentiment and feeling, manifests itself instead in
cruelty and hardness of heart. The little habit of self-indulgence which
you in your foolish fondness have allowed in that boy of yours may, in
after-life, come out as the very impurity which you have endeavored so
earnestly to guard him against. This mystical interdependence and hidden
correlation of our moral and intellectual being is a solemn thought, and
can only be met by recognizing that the walls of the citadel must be
strengthened at all points in order to resist the foe at one.
Truthfulness, conscientiousness that refuses to scamp work, devotion to
duty, temperance in food and drink, rectitude--these things are the
bastions of purity of life, as well as of all high character.

But in these days I think we have more especially to remember that the
Beautiful Gate of all noble living rests, like the gate of the Jewish
Temple, on two pillars, both of which show signs of being considerably
out of repair. One of these pillars is obedience, or discipline. If you
have not exacted prompt and unhesitating obedience in your boy, from his
earliest childhood, to the parents whom he has seen, do you think that
in after years he will obey the Father of Lights, whom he has not seen?
Do you think, if you have let him set your authority at defiance, he
will in future years, with temptation on one side and opportunity on the
other, bow to the invisible authority of conscience? What is it, I ask,
that makes the army the finest school for character, giving us our
Lawrences, our Havelocks, our Gordons, our Kitcheners, but simply this
habit of implicit obedience, of that discipline which has grown so
grievously lax in so many of our English homes? In Carlyle's strong
words, "Obedience is our universal duty and destiny, wherein whoso will
not bend must break: too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained
to know that 'would,' in this world of ours, is as mere zero to
'should,' and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to