Home-discipline should be steady, uniform, consistent and reasonable.  Both parents and children should be guided by the dictates of reason and religion.  It should not be administered by the caprice of passion, nor received in the spirit of insubordination.  It should be prompted by a parent’s heart, and inflicted by a parent’s hand.  Convince the recreant child that you correct him from motives of love, and for his own good.  Let reason and love be at the bottom of every chastisement; let them hold the reins and guide the rod; and when the latter is used, let it be from necessity.  Lay no injunction upon your child without the ensurance of a compliance.

Your discipline should never involve impossibilities or uncertainties; neither should you permit your child to sport with your injunctions.  Every command should produce either obedience or correction.  You should be firm in the infliction of a threatened chastisement, and faithful in the fulfilment of a promise to reward.  Many parents are always scolding, threatening and promising, but never execute and fulfil.  As a consequence they run from one extreme of discipline to another.

In home-discipline, parents should act harmoniously and cooperate with each other.  They should be of one mind and of one heart, and equally bear the burden.  The one should not oppose the discipline which the other is administering.  This destroys its effect, and leaves the child in a state of indecision, leading to prejudice against one or the other of the parents.  It too often happens that parents thus take opposite sides,—­the father too severe perhaps, and the mother too indulgent.  Thus divided, their house must fall.  Nothing is more ruinous to the child than for the mother to counteract by soothing opiates, the admonitions of the father.  Children soon see this, and will as soon hate their father.  When one parent thus holds the reins without the rod, and the other uses the rod without the reins, the very ends of discipline are frustrated.  Sometimes the child is given over to the mother exclusively till a certain age, when the father begins to act without the mother.  This is wrong.  A child is never too young to be ruled by the father, and never too old to come under the softening influence of the mother.

Discipline should be administered with impartiality.  Never make one child a favorite.  Favoritism and consequent indulgence, will produce prejudice against the other children.  It will introduce dissension among them.  This is unworthy the Christian parent and his home.  The history of Jacob and Joseph, as regards both the subject and the victim of parental favoritism, is a warning against such partiality.  It produces, pride, envy, jealousy, family broils and strife, in which even the parents take a part, and by which the husband is often set against his wife, parents against children, and children against each other.