be based
on experience and understanding, let me suggest this means of proof:
Instead of asking yourself how the laws laid down in these little
books would fit this or that particular child, your own or another's,
ask how they would have fitted you, if they had been applied to you
by your own mother. Take the chapter on faults, pick out the one which
was yours, in childhood--oh, of course, you've got over it now!--think
of some bitter trouble into which that fault hurried you, and conceive
that, instead of the punishment you did receive, you had been treated
as the lesson suggests--what, do you think, would have been the
result? And so with the other chapters--even with that much-mooted
question of companionship. Test the truth of them all by their
imaginary application to the child you know best. When you can, find
the principles that your own mother did employ in your education,
and examine the result of what she did. Some of the principles will
suddenly become luminous to you, I am sure; and some things that
happened in the past receive an explanation.

Such a self-examination, to be of any value, must be rigidly honest.
There is too much at stake here for you to permit any remnants of
bitter feeling to influence your judgment--and you will surely be
surprised to find how many bitter resentments will show that they
yet have life. The past is dead, as far as your power to change it is
concerned; but it lives, as a thing that you can use. Here is your own
child, to be helped or hindered by what you may have endured. It will
all have been worth while, if by means of it you can save him from
some bruises and falls. Every bitterness will be sweetened if you
can look through it and find the truth which shall serve this dearer
little self who looks to you for guidance.

Then, when you have found the principles true--and not one minute
before!--put them rigidly into practice. I say, not one minute before
you are convinced, because it is better to hold the truth lightly in
the memory as a mere interesting theory you have never had time to
test, than to swallow it, half assimilated. Truth is a real and living
power, once it is applied to life; and to half-use it in doubt, and
fear, is to invite indigestion and consequent disgust. Take of these
teachings that which you are sure is sound and right, and use it
faithfully, and unremittingly. Be careful that no plea of expediency,
no hurry of the moment, makes you false. If you