Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I: Including His Answers to the Clergy, His Oration at His Brother's Grave, Etc., Etc.Ingersoll, Robert Green
Religion
Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I: Including His Answers to the Clergy, His Oration at His Brother's Grave, Etc., Etc.
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
Another good way to make children tell the truth is to tell it
yourself. Keep your word with your child the same as you would with
your banker. If you tell a child you will do anything, either do it or
give the child the reason why. Truth is born of confidence. It comes
from the lips of love and liberty. I was over in Michigan the other
day. There was a boy over there at Grand Rapids about five or six years
old, a nice, smart boy, as you will see from the remark he made--what
you might call a nineteenth century boy. His father and mother had
promised to take him out riding. They had promised to take him out
riding for about three weeks, and they would slip off and go without
him. Well, after while that got kind of played out with the little
boy, and the day before I was there they played the trick on him again.
They went out and got the carriage, and went away, and as they rode
away from the front of the house, he happened to be standing there with
his nurse, and he saw them. The whole thing flashed on him in a moment.
He took in the situation, and turned to his nurse and said, pointing to
his father and mother, "There go the two d--t liars in the State of
Michigan!" When you go home fill the house with joy, so that the light
of it will stream out the windows and doors, and illuminate even the
darkness. It is just as easy that way as any in the world.
I want to tell you tonight that you can not get the robe of hypocrisy
on you so thick that the sharp eye of childhood will not see through
every veil, and if you pretend to your children that you are the best
man that ever lived--the bravest man that ever lived--they will find
you out every time. They will not have the same opinion of father when
they grow up that they used to have. They will have to be in mighty
bad luck if they ever do meaner things than you have done. When your
child confesses to you that it has committed a fault, take that child
in your arms, and let it feel your heart beat against its heart, and
raise your children in the sunlight of love, and they will be sunbeams
to you along the pathway of life. Abolish the club and the whip from
the house, because, if the civilized use a whip, the ignorant and the
brutal will use a club, and they will use it because you use the whip.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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