Deportment
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young lives as they heed the command to “rise up before the hoary
head, and honor the face of the old man.”
Leviticus 19:32
.
Fathers and mothers and teachers need to appreciate more fully
the responsibility and honor that God has place upon them, in making
them, to the child, the representatives of Himself. The character
revealed in the contact of daily life will interpret to the child, for good
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or evil, those words of God:
“Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that
fear Him.”
Psalm 103:13
. “As one whom his mother comforteth, so
will I comfort you.”
Isaiah 66:13
.
Happy the child in whom such words as these awaken love and
gratitude and trust; the child to whom the tenderness and justice and
long-suffering of father and mother and teacher interpret the love
and justice and long-suffering of God; the child who by trust and
submission and reverence toward his earthly protectors learns to trust
and obey and reverence his God. He who imparts to child or pupil
such a gift has endowed him with a treasure more precious than the
wealth of all the ages—a treasure as enduring as eternity.
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