Family and the City
99
the rattle and din of streetcars and teams, and their minds will become
more healthy. It will be found easier to bring home to their hearts the
truth of the word of God
Counsel on Moving From Rural to City Areas—Many parents
remove from their country homes to the city, regarding it as a more
desirable or profitable location. But by making this change, they
expose their children to many and great temptations. The boys have
no employment, and they obtain a street education and go on from
one step in depravity to another, until they lose all interest in anything
that is good and pure and holy. How much better had the parents
remained with their families in the country, where the influences are
[138]
most favorable for physical and mental strength. Let the youth be
taught to labor in tilling the soil, and let them sleep the sweet sleep of
weariness and innocence.
Through the neglect of parents, the youth in our cities are corrupt-
ing their ways and polluting their souls before God. This will ever
be the fruit of idleness. The almshouses, the prisons, and the gallows
publish the sorrowful tale of the neglected duties of parents
Better sacrifice any and every worldly consideration than to imperil
the precious souls committed to your care. They will be assailed by
temptations and should be taught to meet them; but it is your duty
to cut off every influence, to break up every habit, to sunder every
tie, that keeps you from the most free, open, and hearty committal of
yourselves and your family to God.
Instead of the crowded city seek some retired situation where your
children will be, so far as possible, shielded from temptation, and
there train and educate them for usefulness. The prophet Ezekiel thus
enumerates the causes that led to Sodom’s sin and destruction: “Pride,
fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her
daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.”
All who would escape the doom of Sodom must shun the course that
brought God’s judgments upon that wicked city
When Lot entered Sodom, he fully intended to keep himself free
from iniquity and to command his household after him. But he signally
failed. The corrupting influences about him had an effect upon his
10
Country Living, 13
.
11
The Review and Herald, September 13, 1881
12
Testimonies For The Church 5, 232, 233
.