Nothing justifies such cruel discipline.  It results in depravity of life.  The most notorious criminals began their career under the lash of parental cruelty.  If rods and stripes and cries and tears and cruel beating are the first lessons of life we are to learn, then we shall be educated in as well as by these.  The Europeans surpass all other nations in cruelty to their offspring.  The Arab is tender to his children, and rules them by kindness and caresses.  He restrains them by the corrections of wisely exerted love.  Cruelty does not become the Christian home.  It is revolting to see a parent stand with a rod over his child, to make him read the bible or say his prayers.  You cannot whip religion into a child.  This is opposite to humanity and religion.

Home-discipline from the standpoint of love without law, is the second false system which we have mentioned, and involves the principle of parental libertinism.  It does not consist so much in the want as in the neglect and abuse of discipline.  The restraints may be sufficient, and the threats abundant, but they are never executed.  When the children disobey, the parents may flounder and storm, loud and long, but all ends in words, in a storm of passion or whining complaint, and the child is thus encouraged to repeat the misconduct, feeling that his parents have no respect for their word.  Such a home becomes scolding, but not an orderly home.

                       “Discipline at length,
  O’erlooked and unemployed, grow sick and died,
  Then study languished, emulation slept,
  And virtue fled.  What was learned,
  If aught was learned in childhood, is forgot;
  And such expense as pinches parents blue,
  And mortifies the liberal hand of love,
  Is squandered in pursuit of idle sports
  And vicious pleasures.”

Parents, through their misguided sympathy, often connive at filial disobedience.  Their kindness is most unkind.  Their parental love issues forth as a mere burst of feeling, unguided by either reason or law.  Hence, their sentimental hearts become an asylum for filial delinquency and criminality.  This is no proof of love, but the opposite; for “he that spareth the rod hateth his son; but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.”  Love will thus prompt the parent to chasten his son while there is hope.  Eli was an example of extreme parental indulgence.  “His sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not.”  It was the defect also of David’s discipline, and the fruit of this defect caused him to cry out in bitter anguish, “Oh Absalom, my son, my son, would to God I had died for thee!”