and fulfil the will of God cannot be determined by sentiment or
supposition. We are under the highest and sternest obligation to
discover the laws of the family, those social laws which are determined
by its nature and purpose, to find right standards for family life, to
discriminate between the things that are permanent and those that are
passing, between those we must conserve and those we must discard, to be
prepared to fit children for the finer and higher type of family life
that must come in the future.

Methods of securing family efficiency will not be discovered by
accident. If it is worth while to study the minor details, such as
baking cakes and sweeping floors, surely it is even more important to
study the larger problems of organization and discipline. There is a
science of home-direction and an art of family living; both must be
learned with patient study.

It is a costly thing to keep a home where honor, the joy of love, and
high ideals dwell ever. It costs time, pleasures, and so-called social
advantages, as well as money and labor. It must cost thought, study,
and investigation. It demands and deserves sacrifice; it is too sacred
to be cheap. The building of a home is a work that endures to eternity,
and that kind of work never was done with ease or without pain and loss
and the investment of much time. Patient study of the problems of the
family is a part of the price which all may pay.

No nobler social work, no deeper religious work, no higher educational
work is done anywhere than that of the men and women, high or humble,
who set themselves to the fitting of their children for life's business,
equipping them with principles and habits upon which they may fall back
in trying hours, and making of home the sweetest, strongest, holiest,