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Education
They should be taught that this world is not a parade ground, but a
battlefield. All are called to endure hardness, as good soldiers. They
are to be strong and quit themselves like men. Let them be taught that
the true test of character is found in the willingness to bear burdens,
to take the hard place, to do the work that needs to be done, though it
bring no earthly recognition or reward.
The true way of dealing with trial is not by seeking to escape
it, but by transforming it. This applies to all discipline, the earlier
as well as the later. The neglect of the child’s earliest training, and
the consequent strengthening of wrong tendencies, makes his after
education more difficult, and causes discipline to be too often a painful
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process. Painful it must be to the lower nature, crossing, as it does, the
natural desires and inclinations; but the pain may be lost sight of in a
higher joy.
Let the child and the youth be taught that every mistake, every
fault, every difficulty, conquered, becomes a stepping-stone to better
and higher things. It is through such experiences that all who have
ever made life worth the living have achieved success.
“The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.”
“We rise by things that are under our feet;
By what we have mastered of good and gain;
By the pride deposed and the passion slain,
And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet.”
“All common things, each day’s events,
That with the hour begin and end,
Our pleasures and our discontents,
Are rounds by which we may ascend.”
We are to “look not at the things which are seen, but at the things
which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but
the things which are not seen are eternal.”
2 Corinthians 4:18
. The
exchange we make in the denial of selfish desires and inclinations is an