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!"

Nothing justifies such cruel discipline. It results in depravity of life.
The most notorious criminals began their career under the lash of parental
cruelty. If rods and stripes and cries and tears and cruel beating are the
first lessons of life we are to learn, then we shall be educated in as well
as by these. The Europeans surpass all other nations in cruelty to their
offspring. The Arab is tender to his children, and rules them by kindness
and caresses. He restrains them by the corrections of wisely exerted love.
Cruelty does not become the Christian home. It is revolting to see a parent
stand with a rod over his chi