Horrible Cruelty | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 19, 1882

Horrible Cruelty.

The worst possible cruelty is to let children have their own way, when their own way does them harm.

There is a lonely man in a handsome house, from whom his wife has fled, worn out by many years of abuse and violence. From babyhood to manhood, that man was ruthlessly spoiled by cruel parents. They flattered him, laughed at his outbursts of passion, supported him in his rebellious and vulgar insolence at school.

With his little brain and his big passions, it was impossible to live with him on fair terms. It would have been less cruel to have killed him in his baby innocence than to have let him grow up so.

This is not an imaginary case. We will mention one instance of his father's cruelty, which was known at the time to a considerable number of persons besides his own family. When he was a young man of about twenty years of age, his father gave him every Monday morning a check for a hundred dollars, as his week's spending money. Untrained as he was, you can imagine how foolishly and wickedly he used it. It is hard to believe that a parent could be so cruel as this. But terrible things are done in this world of which but few people hear.

There are many forms of cruelty. Harsh words, harsh blows, hard fare, hard work, all these are sometimes cruel; but ordinarily the pain they inflict is of short duration. The cruelty of which we now speak may give pleasure for an hour, pain for seventy years, and shame for generations.—Companion.