Importance of Self-Control
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Your father’s perverse temperament is seen in his children. The grace
of God can overcome these wrong tendencies; but what a battle must
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be fought. Thus it is with your children. You indulge them as you
indulge yourself. You have no power to deny the appetite what you
desire, and you thus place terrible burdens upon your digestive organs.
No woman can have good health and indulge her fancy as you do.
The same is true of your children. Their mother’s wrong discipline
when she has been able to care for them, and their being left so much
of the time without a mother’s care, have nearly ruined them. Yet
even now a firm, undeviating course will make great improvement in
them; they are not beyond control, although it will be most difficult to
make them what they might have been had the parents been right. The
mother can see the result of the course she has pursued if she wishes,
or she can reform and try to counteract the wrong done. The path upon
which her children are now entering may lead to virtue or to vice, to
honor or to infamy, to heaven or to hell. The influence of a praying,
God-fearing mother will last through eternity. She may die, but her
work will endure.
Brother and Sister H, neither of you realizes the sad condition of
your children. Brother H has neglected to take a decided stand to
control them. The little boy, to a great extent, rules the household. The
management of your two elder children was entirely wrong. While at
times Brother H was too severe and exacting, requiring of them that
which he would not have required of his own children, your course,
Sister H, was far worse. You took the part of the children in their
presence and fired their young hearts with revenge. You gave them
lessons of insubordination and talked disrespectfully of your husband
before them. This course was just calculated to lead them to despise
restraint. An indelible impression was thus made upon their minds.
You are now beginning to see in your elder children the results
of this training; yet you are doing the same work, to a great extent,
with the children that God has since entrusted to your care. Your
inconsistent, uncontrollable spirit is like an insidious poison taken into
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the system, and its bitter results will appear sooner or later. Its mark is
being made, not on sand, but on rock; and in after years it will testify
of your work.
My sister, you have not a sensitive conscience. You must consider
carefully what habits you are forming, and pray earnestly that your