What Family Government Is.
It is not to watch children with a suspicious eye; to frown at their merry outbursts of innocent hilarity; to suppress their joyful laughter, and to mould them into melancholy little models of octogenarian gravity. And when they have been in fault, it is not to punish them simply on account of the personal injury that you have chanced to suffer in consequence of their fault; while disobedience, unattended by inconvenience to yourself passes without rebuke. Nor is it to overwhelm the little culprit with a flood of angry words, to stun him with a deafening noise; to call him by hard names which do not express misdeeds; to load him with epithets which would be extravagant if applied to a fault of tenfold enormity; or declare with passionate vehemence that he is the worst child in the place and destined to the gallows. But it is to watch anxiously for the first rising of sin, and to repress it in time; to counteract the earliest workings of selfishness, to teach an implicit and unquestionable obedience to the parent, as the best preparation for a future allegiance to the requirements of a civil magistrate, and to the Laws of heaven. It is to punish a fault because it is a fault, because it is sinful and contrary to the Commandments of God, without reference to whether it may or not have been productive of immediate injury to the parent. It is to reprove with calmness and composure and not angrily with irritation; in a few words, fitly spoken, and not with a torrent of abuse; to punish as often as you threaten, and threaten only when you intend, and can remember to perform; to say what you mean, and infallibly do as you say. It is to govern your family as in the sight of Him who gave you authority; who will reward your strict fidelity with such blessings as he has bestowed on Abraham, or punish your neglect with such curses as he visited Eli.