Like a neglected forester, runs wild."

There are two false systems of home-discipline, viz., the despotism of
discipline, or discipline from the standpoint of law without love; and the
libertinism of discipline, or discipline from the standpoint of love
without law.

Home-discipline from the standpoint of law without love, involves the
principle of parental despotism. It is extreme legal severity, and consists
in the treatment of children as if they were brutes, using no other mode of
correction than that of direct corporeal punishment. This but hardens them,
and begets a roughness of nature and spirit like the discipline under which
they are brought up. Many parents seek to justify such mechanical severity
by the saying of Solomon, "he that spareth the rod spoileth the child." But
their interpretation of this does not show the wisdom of the wise man.
They suppose the term rod, must mean the iron rod of the unfeeling and
unloving despot. Not so; God has a rod for all His children; but it is the
rod of a compassionate Father, and does not always inflict corporeal
punishment. It is exercised because He loves them, not because He delights
in revenge 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