the
first instance it should be, to the child's mind, the ultimate and
sufficient reason for either believing or doing--for faith or obedience.
This faith and obedience rendered to my earthly father, which is only
partial and temporary, besides serving its own immediate ends, in
securing a well-ordered household and my own best interests as a child,
has the further end of training me for that unqualified faith and
obedience, which I am to render to my heavenly Father, and which is of
universal and permanent obligation. One object of the parental relation
seems to be to fit the soul for this higher obedience. I must, however,
learn to obey my father simply because he is my father, and because as
such he has the right to command me, if thereby I am to learn, for a
like reason, to obey my heavenly Father. No lower motive will secure the
end.

Submission to parental authority is not always the instinctive impulse
of childhood. Where this submission is not yielded, it must be enforced.
Authority, in other words, requires sanctions. The father has no right
to command, unless he has the right to punish in case of disobedience.
Furthermore, if he does not, especially in the early childhood of his
offspring, train them to a habit of real obedience and submission to
authority, he does his children a great wrong. He deprives them of the
benefit of that habit of obedience, which will be of the utmost value to
them in their future religious life.

A man forbids his child to eat green apples. The child abstains. That
abstinence is not necessarily an act of obedience.

He may abstain because his mother offers, in case of his doing so, to
give him sugar-plums, and he prefers the sugar-plums to the apples. This
is not obedience.

Or, his reason and experience may have taught him that the eating of
green fruit will cause him sickness and pain, and so he abstains for the
same reasons that his father, mother, or anybody else does. This is not
obedience.

But children often have not the forethought to look at remote
consequences, or they have not the strength of purpose to deny a present
gratification for the sake of a distant good, and especially for a good
of which they have only a vague idea through the representations of
their parents or teachers. Suppose such a case. Suppose a child with a
strong inclination and desire for the thing forbidden, and with no clear
apprehension that there is anything wrong or hurtful in the indulgen