Parents have been known to tease their little daughter and the daughter of other parents about some little boy companion, and their little son about some girl companion. Such is very shameful and harmful. It fills the minds of their children with impure thought. Keep your own language very modest and pure and the language of your children the same. Keep their thought pure. Impure language [pg 275] and impure thought leads to impure and injurious habits.
Be familiar with your child and talk to him about his secret life. Teach him of the awful evils in the secret lives of many children and how impure words and thoughts lead to such injurious vice. Parents. see to it that there is a loving confidence between you and your child. Be familiar in telling them how wonderfully they are made and what was the design of God in thus creating them. Teach them what a noble and sacred thing it is to use every member and organ of our body to the glory of the Creator. Teach them of the awful crime to misuse any part. Mothers, acquaint your young daughters of the event that must soon come into their life, and thus prevent their doing an injury to their health.
By precept upon precept and by example, train your child to grow up into a beautiful moral life. In love restrain every immoral tendency in your child. Also be very zealous in teaching your children good manners. Civility and refinement are beautiful in the life of any one, and is very closely associated with the morals. Teach your little ones to respect each other, to have a regard for each other's happiness, to practise self-denial for the benefit of others. By precept and example instill gentleness and kindness into their actions. Dear parents, never grow weary in training the little feet of thy tender “olive plants” in the paths of virtue.
Spiritual Training.
The moral life is beautiful, but there is a higher and more beautiful life. In the true, deep spiritual life is found the highest degree of morality. However we may train our children into a high standard of moral life, and yet not attain to the spiritual. It is reported that the homes of certain infidels are most exemplary in moral conduct. Ancient heathen philosophers through restraint, self-sacrifice, and force of will attained to beautiful moral lives. But the spiritual life, which includes the moral, is the perfection of beauty. The life out of which the Christ-life and character shines is the grandest and noblest upon the earth.
Parents, bring your children to Jesus, for of such is the kingdom of heaven. Bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, is commanded in the Holy Scriptures. Your child possesses an immortal soul. This soul will exist either in happiness or wretchedness eternally. It is so ordained in the plan of redemption that the soul can be brought into possession of spiritual life, which, if retained, insures its eternal bliss. He who has attained to a high degree of morality through the force of human will holds communion only with the better qualities of manhood, all of which must perish. He who has attained to spirituality holds communion with God and heavenly things. He does not trust to human powers, but in the power of the divine life.
Moral life will not admit us into the paradise above. We must possess spiritual life—the life of Christ. It is well to train our children in the way of good morals with a view to leading them into the spiritual life. Then it is necessary to lead them into the spiritual life to aid in the moral training. Comparatively few parents have accomplished any great results in the moral training of their children without divine assistance. In the moral derangement of our children the inward tendency to immorality makes it impossible to educate them to a true and perfect standard of morality without God's aid. Have we and our children no other source of strength to do battle with the evil passions but the force of the human will? Who has succeeded in subduing or controlling an angry disposition in themselves or their children to the extent that there is no impatient speech or abrupt action, by their own will power? We admit that some men—as the ancient heathen philosophers—have succeeded in educating themselves to a high standard of morality by using all the power of the human will as a vigilant police force and carefully avoiding occasions of temptation. It is said of one of these philosophers that in order to absent himself from the races and games and bull-fights and other worldly gatherings he would only shave one-half of his face, thereby making himself too ridiculous in appearance to assemble among men. Such is the struggle to attain any moral excellence without divine assistance.
Children should be taught what sin is, and of God's judgments against it, and as early in life as possible be led by instruction and seeking the aid of the Holy Spirit into a Christian experience. Some seem to think that children have no correct ideas of God, and never feel the influence of his Spirit. In this they may be mistaken. The tender heart of a child very often receives a deep and sacred impression by the Holy Spirit. Were we watchful and took advantage of these seasons to tell them of God and heaven we would be workers together with him, and he would reward us by faithful children. The communication of the Spirit with the hearts of children is more wonderful and frequent than we may sometimes understand. A lady recently told us that her parents never taught her to pray, but very early in life she was inclined by the Holy Spirit to kneel at her bedside and pray when unobserved.
Who is the reader that can not remember instances in his early life when he felt the influence of some good spirit and had thoughts of God? Had he in those tender childhood days been rightly instructed he could have been led into the beautiful walks of a Christian life. We remember a child of less than ten years of age, who, hearing his father using bad language, fell upon his knees and clasping his arms around his father told him of his sin and besought him to pray for forgiveness.
A lady writer in one of her excellent works [pg 279] (“Mothers' Counsel to Their Sons”), records the instance of a little girl of four and a half years who felt the guilt of sin, and by her Christian mother was led to Jesus, and there she was blessed by him, even to the witnessing of his Spirit that her sins were gone and she was his child. The child was at one time moved to plead with an unsaved relative to come to Jesus. She lived triumphant in the sweetness of redeeming grace until the age of fifteen, when her mission on earth was ended and she went to her home in heaven. Oh, how glorious! What if that mother, when this child came expressing her sense of guilt, had not instructed her in the ways of salvation? In all probability it would have resulted in a lost soul.