Fragments
187
Parental Responsibility.—Parents are in a great degree responsible
for the mould given to the characters of their children. They should
aim at symmetry and proportion. There are few well-balanced minds,
because parents are wickedly negligent of their duty to stimulate weak
traits and repress wrong ones. They do not remember that they are
under the most solemn obligation to watch the tendencies of each
child; that it is their duty to train their children to right habits and right
ways of thinking.
Sometimes parents wait for the Lord to do the very work that he has
given them to do. Instead of restraining and controlling their children
as they should, they pet and indulge them, and gratify their whims
and desires. When these children go out from their early homes, it is
with characters deformed by selfishness, with ungoverned appetites,
with strong self-will; they are destitute of courtesy or respect for their
parents, and do not love religious truth or the worship of God. They
have grown up with traits that are a life-long curse to themselves and
to others. Home is made anything but happy if the evil weeds of
dissension, selfishness, envy, passion, and sullen stubbornness are left
to flourish in the neglected garden of the soul.
Parents should show no partiality, but should treat all their children
with tenderness, remembering that they are the purchase of Christ’s
blood. Children imitate their parents; hence great care should be taken
to give them correct models. Parents who are kind and polite at home,
while at the same time they are firm and decided, will see the same
traits manifested in their children. If they are upright, honest and
honorable, their children will be quite likely to resemble them in these
particulars. If they reverence and worship God, their children, trained
in the same way, will not forget to serve him also.
[235]
It is often the case that parents are not careful to surround their
children with right influences. In choosing a home, they think more of
their worldly interests than of the moral and social atmosphere; and
the children form associations that are unfavorable to the development
of piety and the formation of right characters. Then parents allow
the world to engross their time, strength, and thought; and when the
Sabbath comes, it finds them so utterly exhausted that they have naught
to render to God on his holy day, no sweet piety to grace the home,
and make the Sabbath a delight to their children. They are seldom
visited by a minister, for they have placed themselves out of reach of