Stewardship a Personal Responsibility
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it creates dissatisfaction, murmuring, envy, and disrespect. Brothers
and sisters who were at peace with one another are sometimes made
at variance, and family dissensions are often the result of inherited
means. Riches are desirable only as a means of supplying present
wants, and of doing good to others. But inherited riches oftener be-
come a snare to the possessor than a blessing. Parents should not seek
to have their children encounter the temptations to which they expose
them in leaving them means which they themselves have made no
effort to earn.
Transferring Property to Children
I was shown that some children professing to believe the truth,
would, in an indirect manner, influence the father to keep his means for
his children, instead of appropriating it to the cause of God while he
lives. Those who have influenced their father to shift his stewardship
upon them, little know what they are doing. They are gathering upon
themselves double responsibility, that of balancing the father’s mind
so that he did not fulfill the purpose of God in the disposition of the
means lent him of God to be used to His glory, and the additional
responsibility of becoming stewards of means that should have been
put out to the exchangers by the father, that the Master could have
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received His own with usury.
Many parents make a great mistake in placing their property out of
their hands into the hands of their children while they are themselves
responsible for the use or abuse of the talents lent them of God. Neither
parents nor children are made happier by this transfer of property. And
the parents, if they live a few years even, generally regret this action
on their part. Parental love in their children is not increased by this
course. The children do not feel increased gratitude and obligation to
their parents for their liberality. A curse seems to lay at the root of the
matter, which only crops out in selfishness on the part of the children,
and unhappiness and miserable feelings of cramped dependence on
the part of the parents.
If parents, while they live, would assist their children to help them-
selves, it would be better than to leave them a large amount at death.
Children who are left to rely principally upon their own exertions,
make better men and women, and are better fitted for practical life,