Parents as Reformers
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when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”
Deuteronomy 11:18,
19
....
The Mother’s Responsibility
We address Christian mothers. We entreat that you feel your
responsibility as mothers, and that you live not to please yourselves,
but to glorify God.... Woman is to fill a more sacred and elevated
position in the family than the king upon his throne. Her great work is
to make her life a living example which she would wish her children
to copy. By precept as well as example, she is to store their minds with
useful knowledge and lead them to self-sacrificing labor for the good
of others. The great stimulus to the toiling, burdened mother should be
that every child who is trained aright and who has the inward adorning,
the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, will have a fitness for heaven
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and will shine in the courts of the Lord....
If children and youth were trained and educated to habits of self-
denial and self-control, if they were taught that they eat to live instead
of living to eat, there would be less disease and less moral corruption.
There would be little necessity for temperance crusades, ... if in the
youth, who form and fashion society, right principles in regard to
temperance could be implanted. They would then have moral worth
and moral integrity to resist, in the strength of Jesus, the pollutions of
these last days.
Temperance in the Home
It is a most difficult matter to unlearn the habits which have been
indulged through life and have educated the appetite. The demon of
intemperance is not easily conquered. It is of giant strength and hard
to overcome. But let parents begin a crusade against intemperance
at their own firesides, in their own families, in the principles they
teach their children to follow from their very infancy, and they may
hope for success. It will pay you, mothers, to use the precious hours
which are given you of God in forming, developing, and training the
characters of your children, and in teaching them to strictly adhere to
the principles of temperance in eating and drinking.