ender-radiant, always enfolded with gentleness and forbearance,
always shielded from grossness or pain or roughness. Now the father's
instinct is to be rough and crude, good-naturedly brutal with the
child, calling the deeper centers, the sensual centers, into play.
"What do you want? My watch? Well, you can't have it, do you see,
because it's mine." Not a lot of explanations of the "You see,
darling." No such nonsense.--Or if a child wails unnecessarily for its
mother, the father must be the check. "Stop your noise, you little
brat! What ails you, you whiner?" And if children be too sensitive,
too sympathetic, then it will do the child no harm if the father
occasionally throws the cat out of the window, or kicks the dog, or
raises a storm in the house. Storms there must be. And if the child is
old enough and robust enough, it can occasionally have its bottom
soundly spanked--by the father, if the mother refuses to perform that
most necessary duty. For a child's bottom is made occasionally to be
spanked. The vibration of the spanking acts direct upon the spinal
nerve-system, there is a direct reciprocity and reaction, the spanker
transfers his wrath to the great will-centers in the child, and these
will-centers react intensely, are vivified and educated.

On the other hand, given a mother who is too generally hard or
indifferent, then it rests with the father to provide the delicate
sympathy and the refined discipline. Then the father must show the
tender sensitiveness of the upper mode. The sad thing to-day is that
so few mothers have any deep bowels of love--or even the breast of
love. What they have is the benevolent spiritual will, the will of the
upper self. But the will is not love. And benevolence in a parent is
a poison. It is bullying. In these circumstances the father must give
delicate adjustment, and, above all, some warm, native love from the
richer sensual self.

The question of corporal punishment is important. It is no use roughly
smacking a shrinking, sensitive child. And yet, if a child is too
shrinking, too sensitive, it may do it a world of good cheerfully to
spank its posterior. Not brutally, not cruelly, but with real sound,
good-natured exasperation. And let the adult take the full
responsibility, half humorously, without apology or explanation. Let
us avoid self-justification at all costs. Real corporal punishments
apply to the sensual plane. The refined punishments of the spiritual
mode are us