EARLY CHARITY | AdventAI

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 29, 1861

EARLY CHARITY.

TRAIN your children in charity. Begin young. As soon as they can speak, they can learn the grace of giving pity, prayers and money to the destitute and distressed. Easier then than later. When the tenderness of childhood and youth has been supplanted by the more earnest and sterner business of active life, it will be much harder to touch the heart with tales of sorrow, and elicit sympathy in its behalf.

The mother of queen Victoria often took her when a small girl, into the hovels of the poor and sick, and thus taught her to sympathize with the heirs of poverty. Childhood is more sympathetic and tender than age. Train it to love the good, to pity the suffering, and help the needy. Send your children with presents to the poor. Give the poor a chance to talk to them. When collections are to be taken, give them money that they can give for themselves. In this respect parents are often at fault. They give for their children, but this will not affect their experience in the least. Give a child a penny, a shilling, a dollar; tell it of the breadless poor, of the millions that have no Saviour, and its own heart will at once respond with the money. To make it liberal, generous, zealous in the cause of God, benevolent and kind to the poor, begin early. All Sabbath-schools ought to institute a system of beneficence, to cultivate the grace of charity in the scholars. The different objects of benevolence should frequently be explained to them so as to enlist, at least their sympathy in their behalf. In this respect it is likewise true: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."