The Christian Home: As it is in the Sphere of Nature and the Church; Showing the Mission, Duties, Influences, Habits, and Responsibilities of Home, its Education, Government, and Discipline; with Hints on "Match Making," and the Relation of Parents to the Marriage Choice of their Children; together with a consideration of the Tests in the Selection of a Companion, Etc.Philips, Samuel
Religion
The Christian Home: As it is in the Sphere of Nature and the Church; Showing the Mission, Duties, Influences, Habits, and Responsibilities of Home, its Education, Government, and Discipline; with Hints on "Match Making," and the Relation of Parents to the Marriage Choice of their Children; together with a consideration of the Tests in the Selection of a Companion, Etc.
Philips, Samuel
Family; Home; Marriage; Parent and child
The feelings, appetites and instincts of children should be thus specially
trained. According to Dr. Gall, there are two classes of feelings,--the
selfish, yet necessary for the preservation of the individual; and the
unselfish, or those which are directed to objects apart from self, yet
liable to abuse and misdirection. Both of these demand a home-training. The
parent should give to each its true direction, restrain and harmonize them
in their relations and respective spheres of activity, and bring them
under law, and place before each its legitimate object and end. Then, and
then only, do they become laws of self-preservation. The natural appetites
are subject to abuse, and when unrestrained, defeat the very ends of their
existence. Thus the appetite for food may be over-indulged through mistaken
parental kindness, until habits of sensualism are established, and the
child becomes a glutton, and finds the grave of infamy.
How many children have been thus destroyed in soul and body by parental
indulgence and neglect of their natural feelings and appetites. The feeling
of cruelty, revenge, malice, falsehood, tale-bearing, dishonesty, vanity,
&c., have, in the same way and by the same indulgence, been engendered in
the children of Christian parents. The same, too, may be said of the
unselfish feelings. These have been called the moral sentiments; and upon
their proper training depends the formation of a positive moral character.
The conscience comes under this head. The parent should train that
important faculty of the child. It should be taught to act from the
standpoint of conscience, and to form the habit of conscientiousness in
word and deed. This includes the training of the motives also, and of all
the cardinal moral virtues, such as justice, honor, chastity, veneration,
kindness, &c. "Teach your children," says Goodrich in his Fireside
Education, "never to wound a person's feelings because he is poor, because
he is deformed, because he is unfortunate, because he holds an humble
station in life, because he is poorly clad, because he is weak in body and
mind, because he is awkward, or because the God of nature has bestowed upon
him a darker skin than theirs."
This early education should commence as soon as the necessities of the
child demand it. A child should be taught what is necessary for it to know
and practice as soon as that necessity exists and the child is capable of
learning. Scripture sanctions this. Our fathers did so. It was the
injunction of Moses to the children of Israel: Deut. vi., 6-9. God commands
you to break up the fallow ground and sow the good seed at the first dawn
of the spring-life of your children, and then to pray for the "early and
the latter rain,"
"Teaching, with pious care, the dawning light
Of infant intellect to know the Lord."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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