Stop before threatening a chastisement that you don’t intend to inflict. Or, if you must persist in this course, don’t ascribe the continued disobedience, which is its inevitable outgrowth, to anything but your own weakness.
Stop short of deception or untruth in your dealings with your children, if you would impress them with the opposite sentiments.
Stop, in this regard, and reflect that, if the childish mind is wax to early impressions, it is of a kind that hardens with the imprint, and that from the hardening process spring the imitation and the emulation, which must gradually corrupt or ennoble, as the case may be.
Stop before assuming a bullying tone or attitude toward your family or your domestics. Vaporings of this description are always in wretched taste, and a home-circle that must needs be terrorized is little to be envied.
Stop before living beyond, or even quite up to your means, and be not ambitious to make an outside show at the expense of internal comfort.
Stop short of lessening the significance of old-time festivities, such as Thanksgiving Day, Christmas, New Year’s and birth-day observances, simply because you have yourself outgrown their zest.
Stop before repressing any innocent propensity to gush on the part of your wife or children. It is a chill home-fountain that will not occasionally overflow.
Stop, if possible, before ever disturbing your family peace with even so much as an unkind or hasty word. The pretty lines,
“We have greeting words for the stranger,
And smiles for the sometime guest,
But oft for Our Own the bitter tone.
Though we love Our Own the best,”
should never be pertinent in a wise man’s household.