IF I WERE A BOY by John Heyl Vincent

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 6, 1893

"IF I WERE A BOY."

By John Heyl Vincent

If I were a boy I should keep my own secrets, except as I revealed them to my father and mother for the sake of securing their advice; I should never speak a word to anyone who might be worried by it, and speak kind words of others, even of enemies, in their absence. I should put no unclean thoughts, pictures, sights, or stories in my memory and imagination, and no foul words on my tongue, give no smiles, but give the rather black frowns and prompt and fierce reproof, to any comrade who dared, in my presence, to utter a filthy speech. I should want to say, as the pure-minded and noble Dr. George H. Whitney, president of Hackettstown (N. J.) College, can say: "I have never pronounced a word which I ought not to speak in the presence of the purest woman in the world."

I should treat my little folks kindly, and not tease them, show respect to servants, be tender toward the unfortunate—and all this I should strive to do for the sake of being a comfort to people, a joy to my parents, a help to the next century, and in the seventh decade of it should hope to be a wise and cheerful old man, who learned, when he was a boy, to govern himself, to be firm in right willing, and to keep up the terraces in God's garden on the hillside. —Dr. J. H. Vincent.