Worse still, he may evince for a time a cynical indifference to all great questions, and all your teaching may seem to be lost in a desert flat.

The days of the latch-key and the independent life have come, and you often seem to stand outside the walls which once admitted you into their dearest recesses, left with but little clue as to what is going on within.
But have patience.

Early teaching and influence, though it may pass for a time into abeyance, is the one thing that leaves an indelible impress which will in the end make itself felt, only waiting for those eternal springs which well up sooner or later in every life to burst into upward growth; it may be a pure attachment, it may be a great sorrow, it may be a sickness almost unto death, it may be some awakening to spiritual realities.

I often think of that pathetic yet joyful resurrection cry, "This is our God, we have waited for Him"-- waited for Him, possibly through such long years of disappointment and heart hunger--only to cry at the last, "This is our God, we have waited for Him, and He has saved us." But it is not all waiting.

If with early manhood the "old order" has to give place to new, and old methods and instruments have to be laid aside as no longer fitted for their task, God puts into the hands of the mother new instruments, new methods of appeal, which in some ways are more powerful than the old.