Our Heavenly Father chastens His children ; by most gracious punishments He brings home to them the sense of sin, and leads them to repentance and amendment. And earthly parents, in proportion as they are led by the Spirit and filled with love, will correct their children, not for their own pleasure, but for their children's good. The truth which underlies these apparently harsh injunctions is this : Love inflicts punishments, nor are any punishments so severe as those which love inflicts ; and only the punishments which love inflicts are able to reform and to save the character of the delinquent.
^ One of the child's main objects in life seems to be imposing its own will on those about it, and this will which the child is always contending for is the merest caprice, and formed no grown- up person can say why. Without experience one could hardly believe what a constant warfare the child wages in getting its own way. That the way of the grown-up person may conceivably be better never comes into the child's head. The child feels the grown person to be stronger, and it learns to submit without the least show of resistance, just as we submit to the weather. But the judicious, loving elder does not like to be always opposing,
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and is afraid of crushing the child's free action, so we naturally let the child have its way wherever we can. Then we come to a point where the child's will would cause great inconvenience, perhaps risks that cannot be faced. Then comes the tug. If the child is not coaxed to attend to something else, it sets up a howl and makes itself almost intolerable. Our children have never gained anything in this way, and they mostly understand when they have pushed their own will as far as they will be allowed, but at times they turn " naughty," and the childish " I shan't ! " has to be met hy force majeure}
2. But education has also a positive side. Wise penalties and " reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself causeth shame to his mother." The child must not be left to himself. The parent must bring home to his child's heart those truths of experience which the child cannot at present know. He must train the child with a view to the growth and vigour of man's higher life. How is he to set about this task ?
(1) By wise observation. — Children are born to go different ways. The master in a menagerie trains each animal according to its nature. He does not try to make a falcon swim, or a fish fly, or an otter climb. But the distinctions between children are no less radical, and are far more subtle and difficult to discern. Parents should remember that because they have succeeded with one child they are in danger of failing with another. They think they have only to cast each child into the same candle mould which shaped their first so well. If men would observe their children, upon whose welfare their most precious hopes depend, with half the judicious care they have bestowed upon beasts and birds and fishes and insects, great would be their reward.
^ The motherly love of the penguin which smothers its offspring was not hers. She saw that mistaken concern illustrated in many a household which was a model of motherly care in the eyes of a blind world. The result of leading-strings and culture under glass was a feeble manhood and a silly womanhood, was failure of the most dire and dreadful kind. Her little folks were treasures given to her to guard and protect, not to mould into her own image. They had personalities of their own, and inheritances of their own. They were individuals not appendages, and it was her duty, she thought, to enrich them by teaching ^ Life and Remains of the Hev. B. H. Quick, 300.
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them how to use their own talents and faculties. Hers was to provide an atmosphere for them to breathe, a purity for them to feel, a liberty for them to employ. She seemed to say : " I am at hand to hold and to help you if necessary, but I want you to develop your own little selves so that when you are men and women you will be persons of a free will and not creatures of circumstance." She believed in discipline, but not the discipline of force, not the bowing to an outside order which imposed itself by punishment, but the discipline of spiritual desire, of reasoned conduct, of moral control of emotion and appetite. The words she used in a sentence in the letter she wrote telling her children that their grandmother had died were very significant, " We must try to comfort each other." ^
(2) By good instruction, — A character which is not built up on the basis of truth, and in which there are not deep and strong convictions of truth, will seldom stand the test of this world, and most assuredly will not stand the test of the next. Truth is as much the natural staff of life for the soul as bread is for the body. It cannot be strong and healthy without it. Ignorance is the starvation of the soul ; error is its poison ; truth is its food and healing medicine,