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Testimonies for the Church Volume 5
reaching in its results, because for the present it is more agreeable for
you to do so, and your children grow up morally deformed, their feet
in the broad road to death, can God pronounce your work well done?
Those who cannot inform themselves, and work intelligently with all
their powers to bring their children to Jesus, should decide not to take
upon themselves the responsibility of becoming parents.
Mothers must be willing and even anxious to qualify themselves
for their important work of developing the characters of their children,
guiding, instructing, and restraining their tender charge. Fathers and
mothers should be united in this work. Weakness in requiring obedi-
ence, and false love and sympathy—the false notion that to indulge
and not to restrain is wisdom—constitute a system of training that
grieves angels; but it delights Satan, for it brings hundreds and thou-
sands of children into his ranks. This is why he blinds the eyes of
parents, benumbs their sensibilities, and confuses their minds. They
see that their sons and daughters are not pleasant, lovely, obedient, and
care-taking; yet children accumulate in their homes, to poison their
lives, fill their hearts with grief, and add to the number whom Satan is
using to allure souls to destruction.
Oh! when will parents be wise? When will they see and realize the
character of their work in neglecting to require obedience and respect
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according to the instructions of God’s word? The results of this lax
training are seen in the children as they go out into the world and take
their place at the head of families of their own. They perpetuate the
mistakes of their parents. Their defective traits have full scope; and
they transmit to others the wrong tastes, habits, and tempers that were
permitted to develop in their own characters. Thus they become a
curse instead of a blessing to society.
Because men and women do not obey God, but choose their own
way and follow their own perverted imagination, Satan is permitted
to set up his hellish banner in their families and make his power felt
through babes, children, and youth. His voice and will are expressed in
the unsubdued will and warped characters of the children, and through
them he exerts a controlling power and carries out his plans. God
is dishonored by the exhibition of perverse tempers, which exclude
reverence for Him and induce obedience to Satan’s suggestions. The
sin committed by parents in thus permitting Satan to bear sway is
beyond conception. They are sowing seed which will produce briers