A Word to Fathers--and About Them

“Looking back,” Roger W. Babson said of his father, “…I cannot help thinking how utterly wasteful of advice children are…. We usually are either too busy or too proud to ask for [it]…. Surely this is a great mistake…. But today it is too late. His spirit has fled. No wealth nor power can call it back…. Those of you…who have parents…talk things over with them more than you do…. Someone else can take your place in almost every other job excepting in the job of being a faithful son or daughter. One word to fathers: Don’t wait too long before taking your children into your confidence. Don’t figure that you’ll know…[there] will be time enough…. This very night…open to them your heart…. Our families do not want us to leave them with a bigger business. They want more of us…. We have only a few years here at most. Let us use them sensibly and quit chasing one another like squirrels in a cage…. No other person in the whole wide world can take our place in the…home….”

Thomas Carlyle said of his father what each of us perhaps would wish to say: “Nothing that he undertook to do but he did it faithfully and like a true man. I shall look on the houses he built with a certain proud interest. They stand firm and sound…. I owe him much more than existence, I owe him a noble inspiring example…. His death was unexpected? Not so; every morning and every evening, for perhaps sixty years, he had prayed to the Great Father in words which I shall now no more hear him impressively pronounce, ‘Prepare us for those solemn events, death, judgement, and eternity.’ He would pray also, ‘Forsake us not now when we are old and our heads grown gray.’ God did not forsake him…. Let me not mourn for my father, let me do worthily of him…. Let me…walk as blamelessly through this…world, if God so will, to rejoin him at last…. God give me to live to my father’s honor, and to His. And…in the world of realities may the Great Father again bring us together in perfect holiness and perfect love!”