and in their misery.  He uses it, not to have them obey Him from fear of punishment, not to force them into a slavish service, and to cause them to shrink with trembling awe from His presence; but to correct their faults by drawing them to Him in fond embrace, in grateful penitence and hopeful reformation, under the deep conviction that every stroke of His rod was the work of love, forcing from them a kiss for His rod, and a blessing for His hand, the utterance of a sanction for His deed, “It was good for me that I was afflicted!”

This rod is very different, however, from that of the despot beneath whom the child crouches with trembling dread, and under the influence of whom he becomes, like the down-trodden subject, servile, brutish and rebellious.  You will reap bitter fruits from such a discipline, which is but the exponent of the letter of the law without its spirit, and which has nothing for the child but the scowl and the frown and the cruel lash.  You might as well seek to “gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles,” as to reap from it a true reformation and religious training.  Your child will be trained to hate the law, to despise authority, and to regard his obedience as a compromise of true liberty.  He will, therefore, seek liberty only in the usurpation of law and government.  He will contemn love, because where it should have been disinterested, and shown in its greatest tenderness and purity,—­in the parent’s heart, it was abused and silenced.

That discipline, therefore, which is ever magnifying trifles, finding fault, scolding and storming, and threatening and whipping, and falling upon the child, like the continual dropping of rain in a winter day, casts a withering gloom over home, makes it repulsive to the child, gives to the parent a forbidding aspect, until the children become provoked to wrath, and regard their home as a prison, their life as a slavery, and long for the time when they may leave home and parents forever.  Such discipline makes the reign of the parent a reign of terror.  It reminds one of the laws of Draco, written in blood.  It produces in the child a broken spirit, a reckless desperation, a hardened contumacy, a deep and sullen melancholy, a mental and moral hardihood which prepares him for deeds of outrage upon law and humanity.  It is unnatural, revolting to human nature, to beat and crush, as if with an iron rod, the tender child of our hearts and hopes.  It extinguishes natural affection; and no subsequent kindness can rekindle the flame.  The child becomes forever alienated, and bears the curse of its maltreatment upon its character and destiny.  “Ye parents, provoke not your children to anger, lest they should be discouraged.”

The following quaint anecdote is a good commentary upon such discipline:  A blacksmith brought up his son, to whom he was very severe, to his own trade.  The urchin was, nevertheless, an audacious dog.  One day the old vulcan was attempting to harden a cold chisel which he had made of foreign steel, but could not succeed; “horsewhip it, father,” exclaimed the youth, “if that will not harden it, nothing will!”