There is the indisputable fact that the strongest and best men and women we know are men and women who were trained in this school, who some time during their life, and the earlier the better, passed under the discipline and influence of that chastening spoken about in the twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, without which we are not children of a clean God. All around us are these men and women, fathers and mothers, who indulge their sons and daughters, who never confront them with moral principle and obligation and duty, and then lament because their children do not seem to have the old iron grasp of duty, the old rigid love of truth and righteousness. Well, it is all very simple. It is because those fathers and mothers are denying to their children the very education that made themselves what they are. The men and women, who will not run away from any task, who stand steadfast in the truth, upon whose every word we can rest our whole soul, grew out of a certain discipline, a certain education, and it was the kind that Adonijah did not have. And all men and women who want to be masters of their lives and to have strength to lay beneath the work of the world must ask God that such discipline may be given to them.
Not alone is this the only kind of training that can produce this kind of character, but unless a man learns control from without, he will never learn self-control. Unless he passes under the discipline of a wiser and stronger hand at the beginning, he will never come to the time of deliberate and moral self-discipline, which alone is character. For this only is character,—the binding of life beneath the firm sovereignty of the principle that is the heart of God. If nations do not realize this they will pay heavily for their failure. “Make your educational laws strict,” said Ruskin, “and your criminal laws may be gentle; but leave youth its liberty and you will have to dig dungeons for age.”
And it is this that gives freedom. There is no freedom outside of character. Liberty, as Montesquieu says, is not freedom to do just as we please. Liberty is the ability to do as we ought. And the freedom that we need is not the freedom of caprice and whim and listening to our impulses. It is the freedom that enables our eyes clearly to see what right is, and then empowers us to do it. Symonds put it in his verse:
“Soul, rule thyself. On passion, deed, desire,
Lay thou the law of thy deliberate will.
Stand at thy chosen post, faith’s sentinel.
Learn to endure. Thine the reward
Of those who make living light their Lord.
Clad with celestial steel these stand secure,
Masters, not slaves.”