Page:The stuff of manhood (1917).djvu/21

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Now I suggest that we put all this positively to ourselves, for every one of us knows that we are treading near some of the moral realities of weakness and need in our day and nation. Why should restraint, obedience, the authority of duty and God be let into our lives? In order that out of all these things self-control may come. And why should there be this submission and control of our lives by duty, and truth and God? Well, the reasons are obvious, the moment we begin to think about them.

There is the indisputable fact that the strongest and best men and women we know are men and women who were trained in this school, who some time during their life, and the earlier the better, passed under the discipline and influence of that chastening spoken about in the twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, without which we are not children of a clean God. All around us are these men and women, fathers and mothers, who indulge their sons and daughters, who never confront them with moral principle and obligation and duty, and then lament because their children do not seem to have the old iron grasp of duty, the old rigid love of truth and righteousness. Well, it is all very simple. It is because those fathers and mothers are denying to their children the very education that made themselves what they are. The men and women, who will not run away