ones,” regarding the significance of the child.  And all must be loyal to his picture of his Kingdom as a family and must, therefore, do what all true families do, become child-centric.  A church in which children occupy the same place that they hold in an ideal family will have no difficulty in finding a place for the children.  It will be a natural and unnoticed transition from the family life in the home to the family life in the church.

Sec. 3.  A PLACE FOR ALL IN THE CHURCH

The family may help directly toward the realization of this ideal by an insistence on the family conception and the family program in the church.  Bring the children with you to the church and seek to find there a place for each as natural as the place he occupies in the home.  If the church makes no such provision, if it has no place for children, in the name of our wider spiritual family relationships we must demand it.  Let the voice of the family be heard insisting on suitable buildings and specially designed worship for child-life—­suitable forms of service and activity.  Let the thought that goes to furnish these in the home be carried over to provide them in the church.

Parents may help their children to find right relations with the church by their attitude toward it as the larger family group.  To think and act toward this institution as our home, the wider home of the families, is to establish similar habits of thought in children.  Such a concept is not always easy to maintain; the church includes many of different habits of thought from ourselves, divergent tastes and habits of general life.  Here one must exercise the family principle of responsibility toward the weaker and immature.  This family, the church, just like our own family, exists, not to minister to our tastes, but that we may all minister to others.

The principal service which the family may render to the church is, then, to foster an interpretation and view of the latter which will relate it more closely to the home and will make it evidently natural for child-life to move out into this wider social organization for religious culture and service.  Surely this should be the attitude toward membership in the church, whether that membership begins theoretically in infancy or in maturer years; the child is trained to see the church as his normal society, the group into which he naturally moves and in which he finds his opportunity for fellowship and service.  The family may well hold that relationship steadily before its members.  In childhood the child is in the church in the fellowship of those who learn.  The Sunday school is the spiritual family in groups discovering the way of the religious life and the art of its service.  The fellowship grows closer and the sense of unity deepens as the child’s relationship passes over from the passive to the active, from the involuntary to the voluntary—­just as it does in the home—­and develops, as the child comes into social consciousness, into a recognition of himself as belonging to a social organization for specific purposes.