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Character Building in the Home

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 20, 1914

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 91, No. 34.

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Character Building in the Home

By HELEN C. CONARD

HELEN C. CONARD

Honesty

How shall we as parents establish the habits of honesty and sincerity in the lives of our children?—By being strictly honest and strictly sincere ourselves. I say strictly honest and strictly sincere, because nothing short of the Simon-pure article will pass muster before a wide-awake child. And of all judges before whom an erring mortal might be forced to stand, such a child is the most relentless, the most exacting. He may not pronounce sentence in measured words, but at the justice bar of his inmost soul, verdicts are being rendered which rob him of every vestige of childish confidence and make him a cold-eyed man before his time.

Sincerity

The men and women who are training children for eternity cannot afford to harbor a flaw in their individual lives. The eyes that look into the eyes of childhood must be unclouded eyes, undimmed by any film of guile, if the child is to be without hypocrisy and without dissimulation. There must be no little duplicities. The thousand little stratagems and falsities constantly being practiced by unwise, unthinking parents,—there is place for not one of them in our system of child training. What! Shall I in a moment of thoughtlessness drop a seed of distrust in the confiding mind of a child that needs but a little time to yield a hundredfold crop of deceit? And if it would but stop with one crop, but it goes on and on in an ever-increasing, ever-accumulating ratio of noxious, cankering venom. And O, the pitifulness of a child that cannot believe the spoken word of its own mother or father! Poor little, helpless, rudderless bark upon a treacherous ocean of uncertainty! In losing confidence in father and mother it has lost confidence in all humanity. And not only in humanity, but in divinity. God to the little child is only the ideal reflection of father and mother. But what may first come to it as a shock soon becomes an accepted condition, and subterfuge becomes a part of its life; and the very parent who, unwittingly it may be, gave it the first lesson in prevarication or evasion is ready to punish it for carrying the lesson to its logical conclusion. How shall we establish the habit of sincerity in the child?—Be sincere ourselves.

Impurity

“Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” But to be pure in heart is to be pure in life also. It is true that through ignorance we may step aside from the path of rectitude, but if our desires and aims are for purity, the acts will soon conform to the rules of purity. A boy or girl may be disobedient or disrespectful or irreverent or dishonest or insincere and yet maintain a degree of physical vigor. All these things leave their impress on the face, but the health of the body may not be perceptibly impaired. But here the mental and moral touch the physical. Social impurity brings disease of body as well as of mind in its train to such an extent that good people everywhere are working to stamp out the evil. But many of these good people who have made themselves intelligent to combat this awful thing that is filling graves and insane asylums at an alarming rate, say that the greatest hindrance to their efforts is the parents themselves. It is so hard for parents to believe that their children are not innocent along certain lines. They know such things are in the world, and shudder at thought of them; but their children are different. If you will read in Volume II of the “Testimonies for the Church,” pages 360, 361, you will find these words addressed to a company of parents: “Some of you fathers have taken your children to the physician to see what was the matter with them. I could have told you in two minutes what was the trouble. Your children are corrupt. Satan has obtained control of them. He has come right in past you, while you, who are as God to them, to guard them, were at ease, stupefied, and asleep. God has commanded you to bring them up in the fear and nurture of the Lord. But Satan has passed right in before you, and has woven strong bands about them. . . . The minds of some of these children are so weakened that they have but one half or one third of the brilliancy of intellect that they might have had, had they been virtuous and pure.” I would not dare to attempt to make any application of these words to any company that I might address; but this we can all do: search to see that we are not of those who are in darkness and asleep regarding this moral pestilence of the world. Let every avenue be guarded that Satan may not slip past us to snatch from our fold any one of our precious flock. The time is long past when those
who have the care of children should lull themselves to ignorant dreams of safety because “our children are not like other children.” That very condition in the past is now yielding its sickening fruitage. The parent cannot afford to be ignorant in these things. An absolute knowledge of the child, a wide intelligence of the physical changes that come to it in the passing years,—these are essentials. If you live with your children instead of altogether for them, you will be in a position to guard them from this greatest of dangers.

Self-Control

“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.” And if the man is going to rule his own spirit, the habit of self-control should be developed before he becomes a man. Do not be content with your ability to govern your child. Watch for the first indication of self-government. The time will come when he will outgrow your control; and if he has not learned to control himself he will be adrift on a dangerous sea, at the mercy of every wind that blows and of every shark that swims. The topic naturally suggests the subject of temperance,—true temperance, which takes account of the dining table, and the bathtub, and the dress, and everything that goes to make up the daily round of life. Believe me, not one of these things is unimportant when we are taking account of character building.
(To be concluded)