“I’LL TAKE WHAT FATHER TAKES.”
“What will you take to drink?” asked the waiter, of a young lad, who for the first time accompanied his father to a public dinner. Uncertain what to say, and feeling sure that he could not be wrong if he followed his father’s example, he replied: “I’ll take what father takes.” The answer reached the father’s ear, and instantly the full responsibility of his position flashed upon him. If he said, “I’ll take ale,” as he had always said before, his son would take it also, and then? And the father shuddered as the history of several young men who, once promising as his own bright lad, had been ruined by drink, started up in solemn warning before him. Should his hope also be blasted, and that open-faced, noble lad become a burden and a curse as they had become? But for strong drink, they would have been active, earnest, prosperous men; and if it could work such ruin upon them, was his own son safe? Quicker than lightning these thoughts passed through his mind, and in a moment the decision was made. “If the boy falls he shall not have me to blame;” and then, in tones tremulous with emotion, to the astonishment of those who knew him, he said, “Waiter, I’ll take water;” and from that day to this, strong drink has been banished from that man’s home. The young lad, in his brief utterance, was really the representative of the generation to which he belongs. God has so decreed it, that the father is the highest authority in the world to his child. Who does not know that “My father said so,” is the end of all controversy with the little ones around us? Who does not see the parent’s tone, gait and manners, continually reproduced in the children whose nature is now as soft as wax to receive an impression, and rigid as marble to retain it, and who watch with a quick, imitating eye those who to them are God’s vicegerents? Would that we could impress upon the fathers and mothers of this country, the solemn fact that the future character of their children is being formed by them; that if they are trained up in the way that they should go, when they are old, they will not depart from it; but that, if they become vain, sensual, and degraded, the seeds will have been deposited, and the bias given in the early morning of their lives.—Temperance Paper.