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176
Temperance
Creating Early Appetites for Liquor
—Teach your children to
abhor stimulants. How many are ignorantly fostering in them an
appetite for these things! In Europe I have seen nurses putting the
glass of wine or beer to the lips of the innocent little ones, thus
cultivating in them a taste for stimulants. As they grow older, they
learn to depend more and more on these things, till little by little
they are overcome, drift beyond the reach of help, and at last fill a
drunkard’s grave.—
Counsels on Diet and Foods, 235
.
The First Three Years
—Let selfishness, anger and self-will
have its course for the first three years of a child’s life, and it will be
hard to bring it to submit to wholesome discipline. Its disposition
has become soured; it delights in having its own way; parental
control is distasteful. These evil tendencies grow with its growth,
until in manhood supreme selfishness and a lack of self-control place
him at the mercy of the evils that run riot in our land.—
The Health
Reformer, April, 1877
.
Weighty Responsibility of Parents
—How difficult it is to ob-
tain the victory over appetite when once it is established. How
important that parents bring their children up with pure tastes and
unperverted appetites. Parents should ever remember that upon them
rests the responsibility of training their children in such a way that
they will have moral stamina to resist the evil that will surround
them when they go out into the world.
Christ did not ask His Father to take the disciples out of the
world, but to keep them from the evil in the world, to keep them
from yielding to the temptations which they would meet on every
hand. This prayer fathers and mothers should offer for their children.
But shall they plead with God, and then leave their children to do as
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they please? God cannot keep children from evil if the parents do
not co-operate with Him. Bravely and cheerfully parents should take
up their work, carrying it forward with unwearying endeavor.—
The
Review and Herald, July 9, 1901
.
Those who indulge a child’s appetite, and do not teach him
to control his passions, may afterward see, in the tobacco-loving,
liquor-drinking slave, whose senses are benumbed, and whose lips
utter falsehood and profanity, the terrible mistake they have made.—
Counsels on Health, 114
.