Good Manners

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 6, 1868

Young folks should be mannerly, but how to be so is the question. Many good boys and girls feel that they cannot behave to suit themselves in the presence of company. They are awkward, clownish, and rough. They feel timid, bashful and self-distrustful, the moment they are addressed by a stranger, or appear in company. There is but one way to get over this feeling, and acquire easy and graceful manners—that is, to do the best they can all the time, at home as well as abroad. Good manners are not learned, so much as acquired by habit. They grow upon us by use. You must be courteous, agreeable, civil, kind, gentlemanly and womanly at home, and then it will become a kind of second nature to be so everywhere. A coarse, rough manner at home, begets a habit of roughness which you cannot leave off, if you try, when you go among strangers. The most agreeable people we have ever known in company, are those who are most agreeable at home. Home is the school for all the best things.—Ex.