1.  Parents should place their children in circumstances calculated to form a good moral character.  They should surround them with a moral atmosphere, that they may, with their first breath, inhale a pure moral being, and escape the contamination of evil.  This has been called “the education of circumstances.”  Much of character depends upon position and the circumstances in which we are placed.  This is seen in the difference between those children who have enjoyed the true christian home, and those who have not.  Hence the first thing parents should consider in the moral training of their children is, the home in which they are to be trained.  This home should afford them circumstances the most favorable to their moral culture.

2.  They should remove all temptation.  Evil propensities are called forth by temptation; and a child loses the power to resist in proportion to the frequency of the temptation.  Hence the exposure of our children to temptation but educates and strengthens their propensities to evil.  On the other hand, if we remove temptation, these propensities will not be called into activity, and will lose their tenacity.  Never allow your children to tamper with sin in any form; teach them how to resist temptation; inspire them with an abhorrence and a dread of all evil.  In this way you prepare them for the reception and reproduction of moral truth.

3.  Another means of moral education is example.  This has been styled the “education of example.”  This has more power than precept.  The efficiency of this means is based upon the natural disposition of the child to imitate.  Children take their parents as the standard of all that is good, and will, therefore, follow them in evil as well as in good.  Hence the parent’s example should be a correct model of sound morality.  The child will be the moral counterpart of the parent.  You can see the parent’s home in the child.  He is the moral daguerreotype of his parent.  This but shows the importance of good example in his moral training.

4.  But one of the most effectual means is, by moral training, by which we mean, to draw out and properly direct the moral faculties, and to habituate them to the exercise of moral principle.  Without this, all mechanical education will be fruitless.  To call forth muscular power you must exercise the muscles.  So you give the child moral stamina by developing its moral faculties, and establishing in them the habit of moral action.  This training has its foundation in the law of habit.  It is given, with its results, in the Word of God.  “Train up a child,” &c.  Also in the old maxim, “Just as the twig is bent, the tree is inclined.”

  “Scratch the green rind of a sapling, or wantonly twist it in the soil,
  The scarred and crooked oak will tell of thee for centuries to come!”

The power and pleasure of doing a thing depends much upon habit.  Our nature may become habituated to good or evil; we become passive in proportion to the habit.  How important, then, that the moral powers of our children be trained up to principles and action until habits of good thought, feeling, and conduct, are established.  Then they will not depart from them; and their moral life will be spontaneous and a source of enjoyment.