Leave Your Children Good Books
Many people are anxious about their children, and are wondering what will befall them when they can no longer have parental care and oversight. They fear that the property they leave them may prove a hurt rather than a blessing, and so they have great anxiety. One thing is very safe to leave to a family of children, that is, a library of good books. Let them be books which will be interesting, healthful, profitable, and of permanent value, and you may be well assured that such books, left in the hands of children, will not be wasted nor squandered, but will exercise a healthful influence, and will perhaps save children from many of the dissipations and follies into which young people are especially liable to be led. Persons who have an inclination to read are not likely to be lonely, and so are less inclined to run after evil company and vicious indulgences than are those who have no intellectual occupations to engage their attention. Let parents begin early in life, give their children good books, and cultivate a taste for profitable reading, and they will have much less trouble than if their children are left to satisfy their hungry minds with the garbage of fiction, and with amusements which have nothing intellectual in their character. A person who has an appetite for reading, and has plenty of good books to read, will not be likely to spend his time over “the devil’s picture book,”—a pack of cards,—nor will he need to hang around saloons, or chase after pugilists and clowns and circuses, when he can hold communion through books with the noblest and purest minds, and can roam the earth from end to end under the guidance of those who have traversed it, and have recorded their experiences and observations. If you wish your children to be intelligent, well informed, prosperous, influential, and fit to associate with honorable and intellectual people, see to it that they have plenty of good reading; and as a tree set out will grow and bear fruit when you are asleep, so a good book purchased may give good counsel and kind advice to those you love, long after your eyes have grown dim in death, and your heart has ceased to throb, and your lips to pray. And the book of which a child can say, “My mother gave me this,” or “My father gave me this,” is more likely to be read, and treasured, and preserved, than one which has been bought for money, and which may be sold again if there is opportunity to dispose of it. Every family should have a library of well-chosen books, and each member of the family should also have his own library,—the beginning of a library; and it rests with the parents to say how the library shall begin, and what it shall contain, and to stamp upon it its character in the very outset. You can largely direct the reading of your household if you will begin in season; but if you wait till their minds are poisoned with evil literature, you may mourn and weep over their folly in vain, but can never recall the lost opportunities of guiding and influencing your children for good.—The Christian.