Modern fathers rarely find so happy a home as it once could be with a bevy of daughters always at hand. But they find the home richer in content, often also freer from petty dissensions. For in the measure in which _each_ member of the family desires his right and his freedom, do all gradually learn to respect those of others. If the parents consider with dignity _their_ right and _their_ freedom, then a reciprocal consideration results after the boldness which youth evinces under the first influence of the intoxication of freedom. Youth, at first so proud and strong in their assurance of bringing new ideal values to life, begin themselves to experience how the world treats these; and what they once called their parents’ prejudice appears to them now often in a new light. Their self-assertion becomes a product of culture, out of a raw material. The manifestations of their individualism become continually more discreet, more controlled, but at the same time more essential and more effective. When then the young people have found _their_ way and the parents endeavour to turn them aside to the main road—which they call the way of wisdom or of duty—then certainly and with right the young people put themselves on the defensive.
Even a devoted daughter cannot bring to the home to-day as undivided a heart as formerly. But this gift was earlier a matter of course, so to speak, a natural result of the conditions. But if to-day a girl sacrifices a talent to filial duty, then it is an infinitely greater personal sacrifice; a real choice. And if she does not make the sacrifice, it is not in the least always on the ground of egoism. It happens often in conviction that the unconditional demand of Christianity that the strong must have consideration for the weak, makes these latter often egoists and tyrants; that the strong, who are more significant for the whole, are thus rendered inefficient.
If a troop of athletic boys continually conformed to the level of the weakest, then all would remain upon a lower plane, and the weak find no incentive to seek _their_ triumphs in another sphere.
On the other hand it is fine and eminently sane and in harmony with the laws of spiritual growth, when the strong shall help the weak to reach a goal which is thus, in his own peculiar direction, really attainable by him. Neither paganism nor Christianity has created the most _beautiful_ strength; it is a union of both. It has found its most perfect expression in art in Donatello’s St. George, in Michelangelo’s David: youths, whose victorious power conceals compassion and whose compassion embraces even the conquered: symbols of strength which has become kind, of kindness which has become strong. If a mother has seen this expression upon the face of her son or her daughter then she can address to life the words of Simeon: “Now let thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen thy glory.” For the glory of life is the harmony between its two fundamental powers—conquest and devotion: self-assertion and self-sacrifice. In every new phase of the ethical development of mankind the cultural problem is this harmony and the cultural profit is not the per-dominance of one of the two but the perfected synthesis of both.