Try It at Home by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 22, 1885

Try It at Home.

By Editor

WE frequently see parents try to control their children and keep them within reasonable bounds in meeting, and make an entire failure. Every such effort and failure is a great annoyance to the congregation, and a cause of mortification to the parents. And in all such instances the children plainly show that they are not accustomed to respect the wishes or the authority of the parents. In every such case the parents are making a great, and, it is to be feared, fatal mistake. If children are not trained to obedience at home, they will not obey in meeting. But if they are trained to proper obedience at home, they will show it in their proper deportment at meeting, and by their regard for the word of the parent everywhere. It will not do to excuse it by saying we live in a bad age, etc. That would only prove that you must put forth greater effort to control them. But we fear that some of our people are especially remiss in their duty in this respect.

Because we are subjected to the inconvenience of holding our meetings in school-houses, and very often in private houses, many lose that feeling of reverence that they formerly had when going to the well-furnished meeting-house, and the children very soon feel the influence of it. We regret to say we have sometimes preached where it was extremely difficult to be heard, on account of the noise of the children; and the great effort to keep them quiet, put forth by the mortified parents, only added to the confusion. It is of no use to try—it cannot be done. If you have no discipline at home, you cannot make them obey you in meeting.

Many seem to think it makes no matter how their children act at home. They can bear it, and there is nobody but themselves to be disturbed by them. But the welfare of the children depends on their training; and many little ones grow up as rebellious in spirit as Satan could desire to see them. Shame and ruin are ahead, and now is the time to avert them. Prov. 22:6; 29:15.