Further, I remark, that home is a school. Old ground must be turned up
with subsoil plough, and it must be harrowed and re-harrowed, and then
the crop will not be as large as that of the new ground with less
culture. Now youth and childhood are new ground, and all the
influences thrown over their heart and life will come up in after life
luxuriantly. Every time you have given a smile of approbation, all the
good cheer of your life will come up again in the geniality of your
children. And every ebullition of anger and every uncontrollable
display of indignation will be fuel to their disposition twenty, or
thirty, or forty years from now--fuel for a bad fire a quarter of a
century from this.
You praise the intelligence of your child too much sometimes when you
think he is not aware of it, and you will see the result of it before
ten years of age in his annoying affectations. You praise his beauty,
supposing he is not large enough to understand what you say, and you
will find him standing on a high chair before a flattering mirror.
Words and deeds and example are the seed of character, and children
are very apt to be the second edition of their parents. Abraham begat
Isaac, so virtue is apt to go down in the ancestral line; but Herod
begat Archelaus, so iniquity is transmitted. What vast responsibility
comes upon parents in view of this subject!
Oh, make your home the brightest place on earth, if you would charm
your children to the high path of virtue, and rectitude, and religion!
Do not always turn the blinds the wrong way. Let the light which puts
gold on the gentian and spots the pansy pour into your dwellings. Do
not expect the little feet to keep step to a dead march. Do not cover
up your walls with such pictures as West's "Death on a Pale Horse," or
Tintoretto's "Massacre of the Innocents." Rather cover them, if you
have pictures, with "The Hawking Party," and "The Mill by the Mountain
Stream," and "The Fox Hunt," and "The Children Amid Flowers," and
"The Harvest Scene," and "The Saturday Night Marketing."