PUNISHMENT

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 7, 1897

Sometime ago, says a writer in the Lutheran, as I was coming up the street, I meet a young married friend, holding her little boy by the hand. The child had evidently had a fall, for the pretty suit he wore was covered with splashes of mud.

“Just look at Willie’s new coat,” she said, in an aggrieved voice. “It is perfectly ruined; and I have had such trouble to get it made. Is it not too bad?”

While I was expressing my sympathy, the little fellow looked up into my face with a woeful expression on his own.

“And mama is going to whip me just as soon as we get home,” he cried.

“I certainly am,” she said in the same indignant tone. “I have told him at least fifty times to take hold of my hand, and he never will do it, and this is the consequence.”

“It seems to me,” I answered somewhat dryly, “that if you have condoned the sin of disobedience for forty-nine times, it is for the sin of falling down that the child is to be punished; for if the accident had not happened, I imagine that the fiftieth act of disobedience would also have passed without comment.”

Her cheeks flushed for a moment, then her honest hazel eyes met mine steadily.

“Your reproof is a just one,” she said, “and I shall not forget it.”

I would like other young mothers, also, to

carefully consider this question of punishment, for it is a most important one. While grave moral faults are often passed over carelessly, a child is frequently very severely dealt with for the tearing of a dress, or the breaking of an ornament, or any other fault that involves trouble or expense, even tho the mischief may have been unintentionally done.

Shocking as the statement may sound, is it not true that when the angry mother relieves her annoyance by punishing the object of it, she is really revenging herself upon it for the trouble it has occasioned?

Certainly it is very provoking to have beautiful things broken, and work that has been the result of much patient labor destroyed through heedlessness and carelessness; yet sometime ago, when I heard a child who had torn a handsome dress answer sagely to another who had told her that “her mother would whip her for tearing it.” “No, my mother never whips for clothes,” I felt sure that she was in wise as well as loving hands.