The Children For Christ by Andrew Murray

wrath. One provocation calls forth another, an angry father, giving way
to his failing of being provoked easily, makes an angry child. There is
innate in each human bosom a sense of the dignity of government and
the duty of submission to authority. The calm, quiet assertion of
authority helps greatly to bring the offender to the acknowledgment of
the justice of his punishment. When, instead of trusting to this, the
parent gives way to anger and passion in the sharp reproof or the hasty
punishment, the child’s passion is roused too, and he is angry and vexed
at an infliction of which he does not understand the reason or perhaps
the justice. Passion ordinarily incites passion; the parent is the teacher
and example of the child appointed of God to meet and conquer
outbreaks of his passion by the gentle firmness of love: how sad when
the very opposite is the case, and a father’s hasty anger inflames a
child’s passion, and he becomes his provocation to wrath!
‘That they be not discouraged.’ In the struggle between good and evil
that goes on in the child, there is nothing so much needed as that he
should be encouraged to believe that the victory of the good is within
his reach, that goodness is possible and pleasant. To inspire a child with
a holy confidence in what, by God’s grace and the aid of his parents, he
can accomplish, is one of the blessed secrets of success in training. In
training a horse the utmost care is taken never to overtax it, or give a
load that might lead to failure; at each difficult place you see its master
all alert with voice and hand to inspire it with confidence; it must not
know that it cannot succeed. That the child may never be discouraged by
thinking that its weakness is not taken account of, that its little
reasonings are not regarded, that it has not received the pity or the help
or the justice it expects, will need a love which children all too little
receive, and a thoughtfulness which parents all too little bestow.
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