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The Ministry of Healing
ment, and the happiness he imparts will bring joy and peace to his
own heart.
The husband and father who is morose, selfish, and overbearing,
is not only unhappy himself, but he casts gloom upon all the inmates
of his home. He will reap the result in seeing his wife dispirited and
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sickly, and his children marred with his own unlovely temper.
If the mother is deprived of the care and comforts she should
have, if she is allowed to exhaust her strength through overwork
or through anxiety and gloom, her children will be robbed of the
vital force and of the mental elasticity and cheerful buoyancy they
should inherit. Far better will it be to make the mother’s life bright
and cheerful, to shield her from want, wearing labor, and depressing
care, and let the children inherit good constitutions, so that they may
battle their way through life with their own energetic strength.
Great is the honor and the responsibility placed upon fathers
and mothers, in that they are to stand in the place of God to their
children. Their character, their daily life, their methods of training,
will interpret His words to the little ones. Their influence will win
or repel the child’s confidence in the Lord’s assurances.
The Privilege of Parents in Child Training
Happy are the parents whose lives are a true reflection of the
divine, so that the promises and commands of God awaken in the
child gratitude and reverence; the parents whose tenderness and
justice and long-suffering interpret to the child the love and justice
and long-suffering of God; and
“As is the mother, so is her daughter.”
Ezekiel 16:44
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who, by teaching the child to love and trust and obey them, are
teaching him to love and trust and obey his Father in heaven. Parents
who impart to a child such a gift have endowed him with a treasure
more precious than the wealth of all the ages—a treasure as enduring
as eternity.
In the children committed to her care, every mother has a sacred
charge from God. “Take this son, this daughter,” He says; “train it
for Me; give it a character polished after the similitude of a palace,
that it may shine in the courts of the Lord forever.”