HOME INFLUENCE | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 13, 1904

HOME INFLUENCE.

The San Francisco Chronicle says:—

One college president notifies parents that if they send spoiled boys, the institution will try to make of them decent men, but that if twelve months show the spoiling process to be going on they need not be surprised to see the hopefuls coming home, all charges prepaid and no more samples wanted by the faculty. It is rare nonsense to expect a college to develop character suddenly in a youth whose father has taught him that it is manly to drink, healthy to smoke, and picturesque to swear. It is the home training that counts for most.

And that teaching is generally done through example, and is followed because of the example, even tho such parent may have sought to teach his boy by words that such things were wrong. Young men have said to their father, “Why do you tell us not to smoke or drink when you do it yourself?” The father replies, “But I see the evil of it, and so warn you not to indulge in it.” “But you do it,” they reply, “because you want to; and so may we,” and so they do, and so they do the other things they should not do, until the whole bent of the young men’s lives is wrong. Even tho they may control themselves enough to remain in college, they are sent into life under a fearful handicap. It is only a step from the pipe or cigar to the use of what some one has so appropriately named “coffin nails”—cigarets; and under the influence of these conscience killers all kinds of crimes are hatched. Home training has its influence; but unquestionably a great mass of it to-day is on the wrong side.