Christian parents! be faithful to the government of your household.  Like Abraham, command your household.  Without this, your children will be your curse and the curse of the state.  Wherever they go they will become the standard-bearer of the turbulent, and brandish the torch of discord, until at last, perhaps, they will die in a dungeon or upon the gibbet.  And then the curse will recoil upon you.  It will strike deep into your hearts.  It will come to you in the darkness of unfulfilled promises and blighted hopes and injured affections and desolated homes and wounded spirits and disgraced names and infamous memories!  And you, in the face of these, will go down with bleeding sorrow to the grave, and up to the bar of God with the blood of your children’s destruction upon your skirts, its voice crying unto you from the grave of infamy and from the world of eternal retribution.  You will then see the folly and the fruits of your diseased affection and misguided indulgence,—­

  “A kindness,—­most unkind, that hath always spared the rod;
  A weak and numbing indecision in the mind that should be master;
  A foolish love, pregnant of hate, that never frowned on sin;
  A moral cowardice, that never dared command!”

CHAPTER XIX.

HOME-DISCIPLINE.

                      “In ancient days,
  There dwelt a sage called Discipline,
  His eye was meek, and a smile
  Played on his lips, and in his speech was heard
  Paternal sweetness, dignity, and love. 
  The occupation dearest to his heart
  Was to encourage goodness. 
  If e’er it chanced, as sometimes chance it must,
  That one, among so many, overleaped
  The limits of control, his gentle eye
  Grew stern, and darted a severe rebuke,
  His frown was full of terror, and his voice
  Shook the delinquent with such fits of awe
  As left him not, till penitence had won
  Lost favor back again, and closed the breach.”

Discipline involves the judicial and executive functions of the home-government.  It is the method of regulating and executing the principles and practice of government.  It includes the rein and the rod, the treatment of offences against the laws of home, the execution of the parental authority by the imposition of proper restraints upon the child.  It involves a reciprocity of duty,—­the duty of the parent to correct, and the duty of the child to submit.  God has given this discipline; He has invested the parent with power to execute it, and imposed upon the child the obligation to live submissively under it.