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FIRESIDE EDUCATION. |
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which common sense and honest faithfulness will always suggest, and which, steadily pursued, must secure favorable results. Among the lower classes of society, we find many, very many families of children well brought up, and among the higher classes, and those too where virtue and christian principle seem to reign, and where religious instruction is profusely given, we find total failure. The children are sources of trouble and wretchedness to their parents, from the time when they gain the first victory over their mother, by screaming and struggling in the cradle, to the months of wretchedness in later life, during which they are brought home, night after night, from scenes of dissipation and vice, to break a mother's heart, or to blanch the cheek of a father with suppressed and silent suffering.
''What are the causes of these sad failures? Why are cases so frequent in which the children of virtuous men grow up vicious and abandoned? There are many nice and delicate adjustments necessary to secure the highest and best results in the education of a child, but the principles necessary for tolerable success must be few and simple. There are two, which we wish we had a voice loud enough to thunder in the ears of every parent in the country;— |
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