Sermons Out of Church Author:Dinah Maria Mulock Craik Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Sermon 333. HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. chapter{Section 4Ill HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. El dear! I'm afr... more »aid I shall never manage to bring up my mother properly," was the remark once made by a rather fast young lady, to whom the old- fashioned institution of "mothers" was no doubt a rather inconvenient thing. " My friend," said an old Quaker to a lady who contemplated adopting a child, " I know not how far thou wilt succeed in educating her, but I am quite certain she will educate thee." Often when I look around on the world of parents and children, I think of those two contradictory speeches, and of the truth that lies between them. The sentiment may be very heretical, but I have often wondered how many out of the thousands of children born annually in England alone come to parents who at all deserve the blessing. Not one half, certainlyâ??even among the mothers. Halve that again, and I believe you will come to the right percentage as regards the fathers. - It is sometimes said that children of the present day are made too much of. Perhaps so. They but follow the fashion of the ageâ??any thing but a heroic or ascetic age. Iso doubt they are a little " spoiled." So are we all. But the errors of the parents, from which theirs arise, are a much more serious matter. How to train up the parents in the way they should go is a necessity which, did it force itself upon the mind of any school-board, would be found quite as important as the education of the children. When we think of them, poor helpless little creatures ! who never asked to be born, who from birth upward are so utterly dependent upon the two other creatures to whom they owe their existence â?? a debt for which it is supposed they can never be sufficiently gra...« less