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Testimonies for the Church Volume 3
Woman is to fill a more sacred and elevated position in the family
than the king upon his throne. Her great work is to make her life a
living example which she would wish her children to copy. By precept
as well as example she is to store their minds with useful knowledge
and lead them to self-sacrificing labor for the good of others. The great
stimulus to the toiling, burdened mother should be that every child
who is trained aright, and who has the inward adorning, the ornament
of a meek and quiet spirit, will have a fitness for heaven and will shine
in the courts of the Lord.
How few see anything attractive in the true humility of Christ! His
humility did not consist in a low estimate of His own character and
qualifications, but in His humbling Himself to fallen humanity in order
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to raise them up with Him to a higher life. Worldlings try to exalt
themselves to the position of those above them or to become superior
to them. But Jesus, the Son of God, humbled Himself to elevate man;
and the true follower of Christ will seek to meet men where they are
in order to elevate them.
Will mothers of this generation feel the sacredness of their mission
and not try to vie with their wealthy neighbors in appearances, but
seek to excel them in faithfully performing the work of instructing
their children for the better life? If children and youth were trained
and educated to habits of self-denial and self-control, if they were
taught that they eat to live instead of living to eat, there would be less
disease and less moral corruption. There would be little necessity
for temperance crusades, which amount to so little, if in the youth
who form and fashion society, right principles in regard to temperance
could be implanted. They would then have moral worth and moral
integrity to resist, in the strength of Jesus, the pollutions of these last
days.
It is a most difficult matter to unlearn the habits which have been
indulged through life and have educated the appetite. The demon of
intemperance is not easily conquered. It is of giant strength and hard
to overcome. But let parents begin a crusade against intemperance
at their own firesides, in their own families, in the principles they
teach their children to follow from their very infancy, and they may
hope for success. It will pay you, mothers, to use the precious hours
which are given you of God in forming, developing, and training the