Parents, your children cannot purchase at any price what you can give them; I mean a subdued will.  To effect this it is necessary to begin when a child is very young.  The earlier the better, if you can make yourself understood.  You need not fix upon any particular age when to begin; let this depend on circumstances, and different children will show their rebellion upon different points.

5. Coming short of attaining the object when you make the attempt—­leaving discipline half completed.—­When a child is corrected, every reasonable object should be attained.  No point should be evaded.  The parent should not stop until perfect and entire submission is effected on every point of dispute.  And first I would invite your attention to instances by no means rare, where the child shows rebellion on some particular point.  At such a point he stops; you cannot move him.  He will do anything else but just the thing required.  He may never have showed a stubborn will before.  You have now found a point where you differ; there is a struggle between will and will; the stakes are set, and one or the other must yield.  There is no avoiding it; you cannot turn to the right nor to the left; there is but one course for you.  You must go forward, or the ruin of your child is sealed.  You have come to an important crisis in the history of your child, and if you need motive to influence you to act, you may delineate as upon a map his temporal and eternal destiny—­these mainly depend upon the issue of the present struggle.  If you succeed, your child is saved; if you fail, he is lost.  You may think perhaps your child will die before he will yield.  We had almost said he might as well die as not to yield.  I have known several parents who found themselves thus situated.  Perhaps they possessed a feeble hand, their strength began to fail, but it was no time to parley.  They summoned all their energy to another mighty struggle.  Victory was theirs—­a lost child was saved.  Some are contented with anything that looks like obedience in such instances.  The occasion passes.  It soon, however, recurs with no better nor as good prospects.  Thus the struggle is kept up while the child remains under the parental roof.

A father one day gave his little son some books, his knife, and last of all his watch to amuse him.  He was right under his eye.  At length he told him to bring them all to him.  He brought the books and knife to him cheerfully; the watch he wanted to keep—­that was his idol.  The father told him to bring that; he refused.  The father used the rod.  He took up the watch and brought it part way, and laid it down.  The father told him to put it in his hand, but he would not.  He corrected him again.  He brought it a little farther and laid it down.  Again he whipped him.  At length he brought it and held it right over his father’s hand, but would not put it in.  The father, wearied by the struggle, struck the son’s hand with the stick, and the watch fell into his hand.  It was not given up.  There was no submission.  That son has been known to be several times under conviction, but he would never submit to God.