The feelings, appetites and instincts of children should be thus specially trained.  According to Dr. Gall, there are two classes of feelings,—­the selfish, yet necessary for the preservation of the individual; and the unselfish, or those which are directed to objects apart from self, yet liable to abuse and misdirection.  Both of these demand a home-training.  The parent should give to each its true direction, restrain and harmonize them in their relations and respective spheres of activity, and bring them under law, and place before each its legitimate object and end.  Then, and then only, do they become laws of self-preservation.  The natural appetites are subject to abuse, and when unrestrained, defeat the very ends of their existence.  Thus the appetite for food may be over-indulged through mistaken parental kindness, until habits of sensualism are established, and the child becomes a glutton, and finds the grave of infamy.

How many children have been thus destroyed in soul and body by parental indulgence and neglect of their natural feelings and appetites.  The feeling of cruelty, revenge, malice, falsehood, tale-bearing, dishonesty, vanity, &c., have, in the same way and by the same indulgence, been engendered in the children of Christian parents.  The same, too, may be said of the unselfish feelings.  These have been called the moral sentiments; and upon their proper training depends the formation of a positive moral character.  The conscience comes under this head.  The parent should train that important faculty of the child.  It should be taught to act from the standpoint of conscience, and to form the habit of conscientiousness in word and deed.  This includes the training of the motives also, and of all the cardinal moral virtues, such as justice, honor, chastity, veneration, kindness, &c.  “Teach your children,” says Goodrich in his Fireside Education, “never to wound a person’s feelings because he is poor, because he is deformed, because he is unfortunate, because he holds an humble station in life, because he is poorly clad, because he is weak in body and mind, because he is awkward, or because the God of nature has bestowed upon him a darker skin than theirs.”

This early education should commence as soon as the necessities of the child demand it.  A child should be taught what is necessary for it to know and practice as soon as that necessity exists and the child is capable of learning.  Scripture sanctions this.  Our fathers did so.  It was the injunction of Moses to the children of Israel:  Deut. vi., 6-9.  God commands you to break up the fallow ground and sow the good seed at the first dawn of the spring-life of your children, and then to pray for the “early and the latter rain,”

  “Teaching, with pious care, the dawning light
  Of infant intellect to know the Lord.”