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Testimonies for the Church Volume 2
desolating hail upon a tender plant; it bends to every blast until its
life is crushed out, and it lies bruised and broken.
Your administration is drying up the channel of love, hopefulness,
and joy in your children. A settled sadness is expressed in the
countenance of the girl, but, instead of awakening sympathy and
tenderness in you, this arouses impatience and positive dislike. You
can change this expression to animation and cheerfulness if you
choose. “Does not God see? Does He take no knowledge?” were the
words of the angel. He will visit for these things. You voluntarily
took upon you this responsibility, but Satan has taken advantage
of your unhappy, unlovable, and unloving disposition, your self-
love, your closeness, your selfishness, and it now appears in all its
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deformity, uncorrected, unsubdued, girding you about as with iron
bands. Children read the countenance of the mother; they understand
whether love or dislike is there expressed. You know not the work
you are doing. Does not the little sad face, the heaving sigh welling
up from a pressed heart in its yearning call for love, awaken pity?
No, not in you. It places the child at a still greater distance from you
and increases your dislike.
I saw that the father had not taken the course that a father should.
God is not pleased with his position. Another has stolen the father’s
heart from the blood of his blood and bone of his bone. Brother
G, you have been very deficient in discernment. As the head of
the house, you should have taken your position and not permitted
things to go as they have gone. You have seen that things were not
right and have sometimes felt anxious, but fear of displeasing your
present wife and making unhappy discord in your family has led you
to remain silent when you should have spoken. You are not clear
in the matter. Your children have no mother to plead for them, to
shelter them from censure by her judicious words.
Your children, and all other children who have lost the one in
whose breasts maternal love has flowed, have met with a loss that
can never be supplied. But when one ventures to stand in the place
of mother to the little stricken flock, a double care and burden rests
upon her, to be even more loving if possible, more forbearing of
censure and threatening than their own mother could have been, and
in this way supply the loss which the little flock have sustained. You,
Brother G, have been like a man asleep. Take your children to your