p. 203 | Telling Children Lies

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 22, 1874

Telling Children Lies.

A BEAUTIFUL young mother sat by us during a three hours' ride in the cars, the other day, and in her arms she held what seems to us the fairest ornament a mother ever wears, her beautiful baby. The little fellow was very noble-looking; somewhere near his second birthday, we should fancy; sturdy and strong, with great blue eyes like wood violets, cunning little white teeth, even as kernels of corn, and rosy cheeks that kept dimpling into smiles. Naturally the confinement of his position made him restless. He grew tired of sitting still on his mother's lap; the cakes and apples she rather unwisely gave him lost their charm, and the bright flowers he kept begging with the prettiest pleading from the stranger by his side at last grew wearisome. Baby wanted to take a turn on the floor, and mamma was afraid to let him. What do you think she did, gentle reader?

Why, she looked her little wide-awake boy straight in his innocent face, and said, gravely:—

“Harry, if you don't sit still, I'll throw you out of the car window!”

In the plainest manner possible she gave her child a lesson in lying. No earthly power would have made her throw him out, and nothing would have been strong enough to tear him from her had danger menaced him; but she wanted to keep him quiet, and so she rushed to the resort of the weak—deception. If two or three years hence Harry shall tell her a lie, she will be exceedingly shocked and pained, and he will be punished and prayed for, and his mother will grieve at his deficiency of moral sense, quite oblivious of the fact that as she has sown she is beginning to reap.

The fact is, that half the babies are trained to tell falsehoods before they are able to walk and talk. The thousands of poor little unfortunates, who are dressed in muslin and lace, and given over to the care and companionship of ignorant hirelings, are so practiced upon and deceived and frightened, and, in short, lied to, that it is a wonder that after all most of them grow up tolerably truthful. We think it speaks well for that much-maligned thing, human nature. But servants are not the only nor the chief offenders. We charge mothers and fathers with being very culpable and wicked in their sins of commission in this regard.

“I have never deceived my child,” says Mrs. Laura Love, who is reading this number beside her baby's crib. When you pretended, dear lady, the other day, that you were not going out when you were, and when you tiptoed off with your bonnet hidden behind you lest baby should cry to go, what were you doing but deceiving him? When you pretended that the abominably tasting stuff you were about to give him out of a vial was good, smacking your lips as if you enjoyed it, what were you doing but acting a lie?

Children have very quick perception. Very young children learn to see through the ways that are dark and the tricks that are vain of their foolish elder companions. Still, as we look into their soft eyes, we seem to hear the solemn words that fell from the tenderest lips that ever spoke to man: “Take heed that ye offend not one of these little ones.”—Hearth and Home.