Chapter 36—The Training of Children
Dear Brother and Sister G,
I am troubled in reference to your case. I see dangers that you
seem never to have realized. Have you thoughtfully and prayerfully
considered your duty to the children you have taken the responsibility
of bringing into the world? Have you thought whether these children
are receiving from you an education and discipline that will lead them
to honor their Creator in the days of their youth? Have you considered
that if you fail to teach them to respect you, their father and mother,
and to yield to your authority, you are educating them to dishonor God?
Every time you allow them to trample on your authority, and their will
to control yours, you are fostering a defect which will be carried with
them into all their experience should they become religiously inclined,
and will teach them to disregard and trample upon divine authority.
The question to be settled by you is: “Am I raising a family of
children to strengthen the influence and swell the ranks of the powers
of darkness, or am I bringing up children for Christ?” If you do not
govern your children and mold their characters to meet the require-
ments of God, then the fewer children there are to suffer from your
defective training the better it will be for you, their parents, and the
better it will be for society. Unless children can be trained and disci-
plined from their babyhood by a wise and judicious mother, who is
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conscientious and intelligent, and who rules her household in the fear
of the Lord, molding and shaping their characters to meet the standard
of righteousness, it is a sin to increase your family. God has given you
reason, and He requires you to use it.
You should feel under obligation, by patient, painstaking effort and
by earnest, fervent prayer, to so form the characters of your children
as to make them a blessing in the home, a blessing in the church, and
a blessing in society. You will receive no credit for your work if you
allow your children to be controlled by the enemy of all righteousness;
the reward is promised for conscientiously forming their characters
after the divine Pattern. If you neglect this work, which is so far-
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