Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 25, 1870
Paul's Cloak.
“The cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments.” 2 Tim. 4:13. This request which was cited by a correspondent last week as a sample of matters of a business character, in giving directions about which “it was not necessary” for the writer “to be divinely inspired,” is thus noticed by Prof. Gaussen of Geneva:—Advent Herald.
“This domestic detail, so many thousand times objected against the inspiration of the Scriptures, from the days of the Anomians of whom St. Jerome speaks; this detail seems to you too trivial for an apostolic book, or at least too insignificant and too foreign from all practical utility, for the dignity of inspiration. Unhappy, however, is he who does not perceive its pathetic grandeur.”
“Jesus Christ also, on the day of his death, spoke of his cloak and of his vesture. Would you have this passage taken away from the inspired volume? It was after a night of fatigue and anguish. They had led him about the streets of Jerusalem for seven successive hours, by the light of torches, from street to street, from tribunal to tribunal, buffeting him, covering him with a veil, striking his head with staves. The morrow’s sun was not yet risen, before they had bound his hands with cords, to lead him again from the high priest’s house to Pilate’s Prætorium. There, lacerated with rods, bathed in his own blood, then delivered for the last punishment, to ferocious soldiers, he had seen his garments all stripped off, that they might clothe him in a scarlet robe, whilst they bowed the knee before him, placed the reed in his hands, and spit upon his face. Then, before laying his cross upon his bruised frame, they had replaced his garments upon his wounds, to lead him to Calvary; but, when they were about to proceed to the execution, they took them away for the third time; and it is then that, stripped of everything, first his cloak, then his coat, then of even his under-dress, he must die naked upon the malefactor’s gibbet, in the view of an immense multitude. Was there ever seen under heaven, a man who has not found these details touching, sublime, inimitable? And was one ever seen, who, from the account of this death, thought of retrenching as useless or too vulgar, the history of these garments which they divided among them,—or of this cloak for which they cast lots? Has not infidelity itself said, in speaking of that event, that the majesty of the Scriptures astonished it, that their simplicity spoke to its heart; that the death of Socrates was that of a sage, but Jesus Christ’s, that of a God!—and if the divine inspiration was reserved for a mere portion of the holy books, would it not be for these very details? Would it not be for the history of that love, which after having lived upon the earth poorer than the birds of the air and the foxes of the field, was willing to die still poorer, deprived of all, even to its cloak and its under-garments, and fastened naked to the malefactor’s gibbet with the arms extended and nailed to the wood? Ah! be not solicitous for the Holy Spirit; he has not derogated from his own majesty; and so far from thinking that he was stooping too low in announcing these facts to the world, he had hastened to recount them to it; and that too, a thousand years in advance. At the period of the Trojan war he already was singing them upon the harp of David: ‘They have pierced my hands and my feet,’ said he, ‘they look and stare upon me, they part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.’”
“But it is the same Spirit who would show us St. Paul writing to Timothy, and requesting him to bring his cloak. Hear him; he too is stripped of everything. In his youth, he was already eminent, a favorite of princes, admired of all; but now he has left everything for Christ. It is now thirty years and more, that he has been poor, in labors more than the others, in wounds more than they, in prison oftener; five times he had received of the Jews forty stripes save one; thrice was he beaten with rods; once he was stoned; thrice he has suffered shipwreck; often in journeyings; perils upon the sea, in perils in the city, in perils in the desert; in watching oft, in hunger and in thirst, in cold and nakedness (we quote his own words.) Hear him now; behold him advanced in age; he is in his last prison; he is at Rome; he is expecting his sentence of death; he has fought the good fight; he has finished his course, he has kept the faith; but he is cold, winter is coming on, and he is poorly clad! Buried in a dungeon of the Mamertine prisons, he is so much despised that even all the Christians of Rome are ashamed of him, and that at his first appearing, no man was willing to befriend him. Yet, he had received, ten years before, while a prisoner at Rome, and loaded with chains, at least some money from the Philippians, who, knowing his sufferings, united together in their indigence, to send him some succor. But now, behold him forsaken; no one but St. Luke is with him; all have abandoned him; winter is approaching. He would need a cloak; he left his own, two hundred leagues off, at the house of Carpus, in Troas; and no one in the cold prisons of Rome would lend him one. Has he not then left everything, with joy, for Christ? has he not esteemed all the glory of this world as dross, that he might win Christ? and does he not suffer all things cheerfully for the elect’s sake? (Phil. 3:8; 2 Tim. 2:10.) We were ourselves at Rome, last year, in a hotel, on a rainy day, in the beginning of November. Chilled by the piercing dampness of the cold, evening air, we had a vivid conception of the holy apostle in the subterranean dungeons of the capitol, dictating the last of his letters, regretting the absence of his cloak, and entreating Timothy to bring it to him before the winter!”
“Who would then take from the inspired epistles so striking and pathetic a feature? Does not the Holy Spirit carry you to the prison of Paul, to astonish you with this tender self-renunciation and this sublime poverty; just, too, as he showed you with your own eyes, his charity, some time before, when he made him write in his letter to the Philippians, ‘I weep in writing to you, because there are many among you who mind earthly things, whose end is destruction’? Do you not seem to see him in his prison, loaded with chains, while he is writing, and tears are falling upon his parchment? And does it not seem to you that you behold that poor body, to-day miserably clothed, suffering and benumbed; to-morrow beheaded and dragged to the Tiber, in expectation of the day when the earth shall give up her dead, and the sea, the dead which are in it; and when Christ shall transform our vile bodies, to make them like unto his own glorious body? And if these details are beautiful, think you they are not also useful? And if they are already useful to him who reads them as a simple historical truth, what will they not become to him who believes in their Theopneusty [divine inspiration,] and who says to himself, O my soul, these words are written by Paul; but it is thy God who addresses them to thee? Who can tell the force and consolation which, by their very naturalness, they have for eighteen centuries conveyed into dungeons and huts! Who can count the poor and the martyrs to whom such passages have given encouragement, example and joy? We just now remember, in Switzerland, the pastor Juvet, to whom a coverlet was refused, twenty years ago, in the prisons of the Canton de Vaud. We remember that Jerome of Prague, shut up for three hundred and forty days in the dungeons of Constance, at the bottom of a dark and loathsome tower, and going out only to appear before his murderers. Nor have we forgotten the holy Bishop Hooper, quitting his dark and dismal dungeon, with wretched clothes and a borrowed cloak, to go to the scaffold, supported upon a staff, and bowed by the sciatica. Venerable brethren, happy martyrs, doubtless you then remembered your brother Paul, shut up in the prison of Rome, suffering from cold and nakedness, asking for his cloak! Ah! unfortunate he who does not see the sublime humanity,146the tender grandeur, the foreseeing and divine sympathy, the depth and the charm of such a mode of teaching! But still more unfortunate, perhaps, he who declares it human, because he does not comprehend it. We would here quote the beautiful remarks of the respectable Haldane on this verse of St. Paul: ‘This passage, if you consider the place it occupies in this epistle, and in the solemn farewells of Paul to his disciples, presents this apostle to our view, in the situation most calculated to affect us. He has just been before the emperor; he is about to finish his days by martyrdom; his departure is at hand; the crown of righteousness is reserved for him; behold him about to be offered: in this world, which he is about to leave, ready to be beheaded, as a malefactor, by the order of Nero; in that which he is ultimately to enter, he is to be crowned as a just man by the Lord of lords; in this, abandoned of men; in that, welcomed by angels; in this, needing a poor cloak to cover him: in that, covered with the righteousness of the saints; clothed upon with his heavenly tabernacle of light and joy; so that mortality is swallowed up of life.’”
“Ah, rather than object to such a passage, thereby to deprive the Scriptures of their infallibility, we should there recognize that wisdom of God which, so often by one single touch, has given instructions for which, without that, many pages would have been necessary. We should adore that tender condescension which, stooping even to our weakness, is pleased, not only to reveal to us the highest thoughts of Heaven in the simplest language of earth, but also to offer them to us under forms so living, so dramatic, so penetrating, often compressing them in order to render them more intelligible, within the narrow space of a single verse.”
“It is, then, thus that St. Paul by these words thrown at hazard, even into the last commission of a familiar letter, casts for us a rapid flood of light over his ministry, and discovers to us, by a word, the entire life of an apostle; as a single flash of lightning in the evening illuminates in an instant all the tops of our Alps; and as persons sometimes show you all their soul by a single look.”—Theopneusty, pp. 237–243.
STRENGTH
Can you stand for God, though you stand alone,
With your heart at rest, and your soul secure?
With your feet on the rock, and your eye on the throne,
Can you stand and toil, and stand and endure?
Can you stand for God ’mid the storm’s wild wail?
Can you stand when tempests ride the air?
Can you stand when earthly hopes shall fail?
Can you stand for God and never despair?
Can you stand for God when your heart grows faint,
When your sad soul looks through the blinding tears?
Can you stand without murmuring or complaint,
Through the tedious days and toilsome years?
Can you stand for God while the witching smile,
And the siren song, and the world’s caress,
Unite their charms with the serpent’s guile,—
Can you stand with only God to bless?
Can you stand in the faith though the time be long,
Though the night be dark and the day-star dim?
Can you stand and in His own strength be strong,
Till at last you are found in peace of him?
Can you stand?—Then stand in the strength of God,
Through the waning years of this world of woe;—
When the golden streets are by pilgrims trod,
You shall stand within and his glory know.
That Old Skull.
By Pres. Tuttle
[The following is a capital hit on that popular farce and prime minister of skepticism, geological guess-work.]
A few weeks ago, a society of scientific men met in the city of Chicago, to discuss a great variety of questions pertaining especially to the natural sciences. Pure mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, botany, geology, and some other sciences furnished themes for some truly learned papers and discussions.
It was a noticeable fact that in some of the discussions—such as astronomy and chemistry—the lecturers were very positive, as if aware their footing was sure; whilst in some others they were subdued and modest in tone, as though not so sure that all they said was true. The spirit and deportment of the association were worthy of men exploring God’s secret things in Nature.
One lecture was noteworthy. It was read by Prof. Whitney, in the elegant Baptist church on Wabash Avenue. The lecturer had his blackboard and crayon, to illustrate the geological character of the place in which was found the fragment of a skull which has become famous all over the scientific world. Aside from the skull itself, the lecture was charming in the definiteness with which it described places and phenomena of a truly extraordinary character. No one could surmise that the lecturer had any theory or pet notion to be cared for, so carefully and candidly did he state all he had learned about the locality, the strata, the mining-shaft, who owned it, who found the skull, and when, what was done with it and said about it, how it came into his hands—and, indeed, as candid and dispassionate a statement of all he knew about the relic as he could have made concerning a proposition in geometry.
The general fact thus stated and evidently believed by the professor was that this skull of a human being was found in a much lower and earlier geological formation than is usually assigned to man. He did not make the inference, but others did, that, inasmuch as human bones have at last been found in this early geological formation, they must have been there long prior to the date usually assigned as the origin of the race. The usual account, in harmony with the records of Moses, asserts that man was created about six thousand years ago; and the weight of scientific testimony thus far has been in favor of this account. Now, if human remains are found in the tertiary—when the usual account can be justified by finding them only in the post-tertiary—then we shall be compelled to give up that common theory, and with it the first and second chapters of the book of Genesis. It is a grave matter.
Some of the learned gentlemen at Chicago quite put the blush on the common theory of six thousand years as defining the time of man’s origin; and talked of thirty, forty, and even seventy, thousand years, in place of six.
Meanwhile, that old skull sat ghastly and silent on the table at the lecturer’s side. Not a word did it speak; and yet I fancied I detected a smile on its unclothed cheek-bones and jaws, to hear what the credulous savans—not the lecturer—were saying about it, as having come down from such a distant age to tell them “Moses did not know what he wrote about!”
Yes; that old skull, found down in the tertiary in that volcanic region, could not have got there by any little eccentricities of the earthquakes’ cracking the strata of the earth, to let it down where it did not belong. There it belonged, and nowhere else; and, therefore, etc.
Speaking of earthquakes. In 1755 occurred that which destroyed Lisbon. When it began to rock the earth, and the solidest buildings began to fall, thousands of the affrighted people rushed to “the marble quay which had just been constructed at great expense. It suddenly sunk with them, like a ship foundering at sea. But, when the water closed over the place, no fragments of the wreck, none of the vessels and boats near by that were drawn into the whirlpool, and not one of the thousands of bodies carried down, reappeared upon the surface. Over the spot the water stood six hundred feet deep, and beneath this, locked in the fissured rocks, in chasms of unknown depths, lie the relics of what was the life and wealth of this portion of the earth in the middle of the 18th century. These rocks are the clayey and other comparatively soft strata of the tertiary formation. When, in some future epoch, they are raised again to the surface by a convulsion of the same nature of that which engulfed them, the vestiges they contain may reappear, converted, in part or wholly, into stone, like fossils entombed when the strata were deposited.”
There sat the silent old skull on the lecturer’s table, and seemed to me to be trying to say: “By-and by, a few hundred years hence, some diver or miner will find an old skull down in the tertiary under where the Lisbon quay sunk in 1755; and some very wise men, meeting in Chicago, will say, ‘Here it is in the tertiary! It is at least seventy thousand years old! Moses wrote what he did because he did not know any better.’ And yet, gentlemen savans, that skull belonged to a live man on the 1st of November, 1755, who sunk down in an instant into the tertiary from as good post-tertiary as what you now stand on! Do not be deceived, gentlemen, for Moses will yet beat you all!”
Who knows but Prof. Whitney’s California skull found its resting-place in the same way, and as quickly? In that awful earthquake, last spring, at one of the Sandwich Islands, as our missionary, Pogue, declares, a huge volume of red mud was thrown out of the crater, at the rate of a mile a minute, three miles, and buried a whole village, in an instant, fifty feet deep. Perhaps it was tertiary mud; and by-and-by some miner may find under it some old skull, seventy thousand years old, to bear its testimony against Moses! Who knows?—Pres. Tuttle.
The Vindication.—The Great Incentive.
We sometimes meet with those who intimate that a spirit of constant watching and waiting for the return of the heavenly Master is incompatible with earnest labor and usefulness in the cause of God. That it paralyzes effort, and hinders labor for the salvation of men.
That there are lazy men and fanatics who hold these sentiments, is true,—but what truth has not been dishonored by hypocrites and false friends? The following glowing words of Dr. Bonar, set this matter in its proper light.—The Christian.
“Do I paralyze effort when I say, ‘Work while it is day, for the night cometh when no man can work’? Nay, do I not thus stimulate zeal, and toil, and prayer, and love, to the uttermost? Do I lull men asleep, when I say, ‘The coming of the Lord draweth nigh’? or do I flatter into flesh-pleasing the great, or the noble, or the beautiful, of the earth, when I tell them that ‘——the tide of pomp, / That beats upon the high shore of this world,’ is ebbing fast? Do I tempt the sinner to postpone his conversion, because I speak of the ‘wrath to come’ as so very nigh? Or do I, with less serious haste, beseech men to be reconciled to God, because I add that the time of reconciliation, the acceptable year of the Lord, is fast running to a close? Do I cherish idleness instead of diligence, softness of spirit instead of hardness, heedlessness about redeeming time, instead of eagerness to gather up its fragments, when I announce that ‘The day goeth away, and the shadows of evening are stretched out’? Do I soothe the bride into a deeper sleep, when I say, ‘Behold the Bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet him’? Do I tempt the minister or the missionary into indolent security when I declare that ‘The Judge standeth before the door,’ and that ere long the time of working and preaching and inviting will be over? Do I persuade the soldier of the risen Jesus to ungird his weapons because I tell him that his feet are already on the battle-field, and bid him listen to the loud roar afar, that forewarns of the deadly onset? Do I preach Christ crucified the less, because I preach also Christ coming to reign? or do I the less proclaim that ‘here we have no continuing city,’ because I can point so clearly to that which is to come, the ‘city which hath foundations, whose builder and whose maker is God’? Or do I make saints feel the less that they are strangers here, because I set forth to them the ‘new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness’? Do I undervalue the cross because I magnify the throne? In holding up to view the crown of glory, do I deprecate the crown of thorns? Do I enfeeble my proclamation of immediate and free forgiveness to sinners, through the sin-bearer, because I enforce it with the announcement that the coming of the Lord draweth nigh? Do I foster error, or heresy, or lax walking, or any departure from the faith, when I warn men that the perilous times of the last days are setting in, when Satan will ‘cast abroad the rage of his wrath,’ and the unclean spirits will overflow the earth with their delusions, to deceive, if it were possible, the very elect, and to gather the nations to the battle of the great day of God Almighty?”
“I do not know how it may be with others, but I feel that when I can say that the coming of the Lord draweth nigh, I have got a weapon in my hand of no common edge and temper. To be able to announce, ‘The Lord will come,’ is much; but to be able to say without the reservation of an interval, ‘He is at hand,’ is greatly more. I can go to the struggling saint against whom the battle seems to go hard, and say, ‘Faint not; the Lord is at hand, and he will bruise Satan under your feet shortly’. To the saint, wearied with a vexing world, fretted with its vanities, and troubled with the thickening darkness of its midnight, I can say, ‘Be of good cheer, the Lord is at hand; but a little while and that world shall cease to vex; sooner than you think the morn will break,—yea, before it is broken, we shall be caught up and meet morning ere it is yet spread upon the mountains.’ To the suffering saint I can say, ‘Weep not; the Lord is at hand;147the torn heart shall be bound up, and the bitterness of bereavement forgotten in the joy of union forever.’ To the flagging saint, heavy and slothful in his walk, I can say, ‘Up, for the Lord is at hand; work while it is day; look at a dying world, all unready for its Judge; cast off your selfishness and love of ease.’ To the covetous saint I can say, ‘The Lord is coming—it is no time for hoarding now—heap not up treasure for the last days.’”
“Next our own salvation, must come the duty of sending the gospel to all. We begin at the inner circle; but woe to us if we stop there. Woe be to us if we preach not the gospel to every creature. We feel a peculiar call to this, and a peculiar urgency enforcing this call from our very system. For but a little time remaineth. The night is falling. The storm is beginning to burst. We cannot tarry—we must go forth. We cannot heap up treasure for the last days. We must give liberally as long as the time allows. Those who look for a calm, long day, may sit down listlessly, but we dare not. Those who look for a mere extension of the present state of religion as all the millennium the world is to enjoy, may excuse themselves from giving, and may heap up treasures. But we dare not, we feel that there is not a moment to be lost; and that whether there are few or many to be saved, it matters not to us. We must fulfill our ministry, not counting even our lives dear unto us, that we may do the will of Him who sends us, and testify the gospel of the grace of God.”
Good Words Cost Nothing, But Are Worth Much
Good words cost nothing, but are worth much.
The Liberty of Love.
There are two kinds of fear. One of them is the most delightful, the other the most painful, emotion we know. The fear of God as felt by his child is sweet, and is a melting of the whole being into tenderness for everything that concerns his glory. It has no slavery in it. Of the subject of this fear it is written, “Happy is the man that feareth always.” He is happy in having a nature so much above that of worldlings as to be pained at the approach of sin, and has a very tender sensibility as to its contact with his own person. This fear springs from the consciousness of living in the atmosphere of Heaven.
The proper expression of his life in action is, “I have set the Lord always before me.” Such a man shall always dwell in the presence of the Lord. It is to the perfection of such a character that the whole gospel of Christ is directed. This is the man who has made the Lord his trust, and whose hope the Lord is. These are they who “sanctify the Lord God in their hearts,” and they are ready to give to every man that asketh them a reason of the hope that is in them, with meekness and fear. Such a hope is connected with purity and with love.
The fear of God, therefore, is most refining and exalting. It casts out the other kind of fear which is slavish; the fear that hath torment. While the fear of God is experienced in freedom, this is the devil’s chain binding the soul to danger and to death. Now the word of God says that while the former kind of fear is Heaven assuring, and therefore an emotion which God loves to see in his people, the other, the slavish fear, has no rightful place in the Christian church. Jesus was slain that we might be free, and that his gospel liberty might be the common inheritance of his people. And so he sent the Holy Ghost that his love might be shed abroad in our hearts. If that love be shed abroad there, where is slavish fear? It cannot be found. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear; because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.”
It is then a fact of this dispensation of the church of Christ, a fact of its life, a natural outgoing of the plan of salvation by the cross as illustrated by the lives of those who receive the grace of God with simplest faith, that all tormenting fear is banished. So then we shall expect to see the persons who enjoy this salvation delivered from all the fears which beforetime chained them to the earth, constrained their action, made them waver, filled them with distress and gloomy forebodings, made an “aching void” in their souls, and robbed them of substantial comfort.
Now, if we be told by any that they have such fears, we must say to them that they doubtless fail of receiving the things which “are freely given them of God.” God has given them freely, but they do not receive these great blessings of his everlasting covenant. It may be that they do not believe that it is the design of God to save them from their fears. But here is the word of God for it: “There is no fear in love; perfect love casteth out fear.” It is vain to say that they cannot be made perfect in love, for that is to say that the Holy Ghost cannot do his work in them, that the blessed Paraclete is unequal to the task which God’s precious promises to his people impose upon him. Nay, let God be true, and every man a liar. Unbelief would rob the Saviour of his crown, and fill Heaven with tears.
The Holy Ghost can and will do for every man every jot and tittle of the promises which the blood of Christ has made the portion of his people. Fear that hath any torment cannot stand the joy of his love. It will fade like mist upon the mountain before the morning sun. Have you fears of anything that can befall you? Then you have not the true fear of God which is always tender to the very first risings of unbelief, you have not that perfect love which you may have, and which becomes those who profess a vital attachment to the Lord Jesus Christ.
1. The fear of man is taken away by Jesus, and you will enjoy the liberty if you only abide in him. “For God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”
2. The fear of any evils, or what men call evils. The righteous trust and are not afraid; they know very well that when Jesus utters an injunction, he never withholds grace for its obedience; and they fear not them which kill the body.” “They are careful for nothing, but in everything by prayer and thanksgiving they make their requests known unto God.”
3. Jesus takes away the fear of death. He took part of our nature, that “through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is the devil; and deliver them, who, through fear of death, were all their lifetime subject to bondage.”
Beloved, with Jesus Christ your life is hid in God. What enemy can reach it? Though Satan be the prince of the power of the air, he cannot see the throne. The glory of our citadel blinds his vision, and makes him tremble in hellish fear and unavailing rage. Up and believe! There is no heterodoxy in that love which banishes fear. ABIDE IN CHRIST.—Sel.
The Treatment of Children.
[Bro. Smith: I think the following article is worth the careful reading of every mother. Could it be carefully practiced, how many children would be saved from ruin. D. M. Canright.]
A mother, who has felt deeply for those sorrows of children which are caused by the injudicious treatment of parents, submits the following hints to mothers.
Most of these rules were written for her own guidance many years ago. After extensive observation, she has thought they might possibly be of benefit to those young mothers who wish to see their children truly pious, and who desire to secure their warmest and tenderest love:
1. I will begin with the Bible as the foundation of all government. Let Bible principles, Bible motives, Bible examples, be held constantly before myself and my children.
2. I will strive to be myself what I wish my children to become. “As is the mother, so is the daughter.” “The mother forms the man.”
3. I will be sure that my instructions and my practice correspond.
4. I will cultivate a serene, cheerful, heavenly spirit, and a dignified demeanor.
5. I will cultivate firmness and decision, with the utmost kindness and gentleness.
6. I will strive to govern myself. Self-control and perfect self-possession are essential to a proper exercise of authority.
7. I will make it my constant prayer and effort so to train my children that I may secure their affection, their respect, and their obedience.
8. I will remember the importance of training well the first child; as the eldest exerts great influence over the younger children.
9. I will remember that the will must be subdued, and habits of obedience formed very early; believing that if I have complete control of the child before five years of age, I shall have little trouble afterward. The first ten years is the forming period.
10. I will insist on habitual, prompt, and cheerful obedience; and that without always giving the reasons. I will allow no pouting, no fretting, no questioning, no reasoning, no disputing, delaying, or answering again. I will train them to believe that I know what is best.
11. I will make but few rules, and be firm in enforcing them, giving no needless commands, but seeing that those given are strictly obeyed. I will never command what I cannot enforce.
12. I will seldom accompany a command with a threat, but have it understood from the first that a penalty must always be expected for disobedience.
13. I will have it understood from the first that my “Yes” or “No” is a decided and final answer. If there is habitually no parleying, there will be no teasing.
14. After deciding a question, I will seldom change; if for some reason it may be necessary, I will be careful to fully explain the reason.
15. I will never tantalize and irritate by indecision, keeping the child in suspense; but if the request is improper, kindly and decidedly refuse at once. The child will submit with ease to an immediate denial; but after expectations have been raised by suspense, it may cause many and bitter tears.
16. I will not govern capriciously, but strive to maintain a steady, uniform, firm, and mild course, so that the child may always understand just what is expected of it. I will never reprove sharply at one time for what at another I would pass over without the slightest notice. If I govern according to my moods and impulses, I shall be sure to act unjustly, and forfeit the respect and alienate the affections of the child.
17. I will be careful not to be more severe for mistakes and accidents and trifling annoyances, than for real evils of character.
18. I will always, unless special reasons suggest otherwise, punish for a willful act of disobedience, and be more displeased and severe for an act of disobedience than for any other offense; for if I secure the obedience of my child, I have the best security against the assaults of sin in every other form.
19. I will remember that careful discretion must be exercised in regard to the mode and severity of punishment. The characters of children are so different that what would be a severe punishment for one would be nothing at all for another. I will never use severity when a firm, gentle word is sufficient; nor punish severely when a light punishment will answer the purpose. Severity leads to concealment, deceit, and falsehood. I will remember that discipline is not necessarily punishment, and that punishment is not always wise discipline. I will strive to make my children love and obey without fear, and keep their affections and sensibilities tender.
20. I will on no account punish in anger.
21. I will never strike a child on the head.
22. I will not pull the hair or ears, or use violence in any way. This treatment enrages the child, and develops the worst passions.
23. I will not deprive a child of its necessary food by way of punishment. I have seen its evil effects, both on the health and the disposition.
24. I will endeavor to make my children feel that a punishment is a serious affair, and cannot often be repeated. When they disobey, or commit an act deserving punishment, I will, if practicable, retire with them privately, and after talking with them seriously, tenderly, and tearfully, of the nature and sin of their offense, and praying with them, I will inflict the punishment. I believe this mode, if commenced early, and persisted in, will seldom fail to soften the heart and insure respect for the parent. When a child can be made to feel that punishment is deserved and justly administered, he will generally be submissive.
25. For a spirited boy I will use the rod, as Solomon directs. For girls and timid children, milder punishments may be sufficient. For small children I consider a little tingling rod more effective, and less injurious, than hard slaps with the hand which bruise the flesh.
26. I will not punish before others when I can avoid it.
27. I will avoid the habit of saying, “Naughty child!” and the like, for every trifling fault. Words of blame should never be used without real cause.