TRAINING THE YOUNG by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 21, 1881

TRAINING THE YOUNG.

By Editor

THOSE who have the training of young Christians, especially child-Christians, often make the mistake of trying to fashion them too quickly to rules that apply properly to people advanced in life. The editor remembers a well meaning minister who undertook to rebuke him, when he was a lad of twelve, for playing ball with other boys of like age. The considerate support of a wise and pious father brought the boy much comfort and perhaps saved him from spiritual disaster. Young shoulders cannot now be fitted with old heads any more successful than in the days of our fathers. Mrs. W. F. Crafts, writing in the Sunday-School Times, says very fitly on this subject: "A constant remembrance of the time when he, too, was young, is the only safe ground on which a teacher, either secular or religious, can operate on the hearts of the young. Without this, there is a certainty that the garment of righteousness will be made according to a pattern much too large. It will not fit. Each year Hannah took to her little son, the child-priest, in God's temple, a linen ephod. She made the ephods larger, year by year; so must the garment of righteousness be fashioned to fit child-Christians."—Our Bible Teacher.