Dangers and Duty of Ministers
115
see the necessity of making the same allowance for their poor children.
They excuse in themselves that, which if they see in their children,
who have not their years of experience and discipline, they would
highly censure. Some parents are of a nervous temperament, and when
fatigued with labor, or oppressed with care, do not labor to preserve
a calm state of mind, but manifest to those who should be dearest to
them on earth, fretfulness and lack of forbearance, which displeases
God, and brings a cloud over the family. Children, in their troubles,
should often be soothed with tender sympathy. Mutual kindness and
forbearance will make home a paradise, and attract holy angels into
the family circle.
The mother can and should do much toward controlling her nerves
and mind when it is depressed; and even when she is sick, she can,
if she only schools herself, be pleasant and cheerful, and can bear
more of their noise than she would once have thought it possible. If
infirmities, or depression of spirits affect the mother, she should not
make the children feel her infirmities, and cloud their young, sensitive
minds, and cause them to feel that the house is a tomb, and the mother’s
room the most dismal place in the world. The mind and nerves can
gain tone, and strength, by exercising the will. The power of the will
in many cases will prove a mighty soother of the nerves.
Do not let your children see you with a clouded brow. If they yield
to temptation, and afterward see and repent of their error, forgive them
just as freely as you hope to be forgiven of your Father in Heaven.
Kindly instruct them, and bind them to your hearts. It is a critical
time for children. Influences will be thrown around them to wean
them from you, which you must counteract. Teach them to make you
their confident. Let them whisper in your ear their trials and joys. By
encouraging this, you will save them from many a snare that Satan has
[131]
prepared for their inexperienced feet. But if you treat your children
only with sternness, if you forget your own childhood, and forget that
they are but children, and try to make them perfect, and make them
men and women in their acts at once, you will close the door of access
which you might otherwise have to your children, and you drive them
to open a door for injurious influences, to affect their young minds,
and before you awake to their danger, their minds have been poisoned
by others.