It is
better to prevent crimes than to punish them; for prevention is more than
cure.
Hence the first thing in discipline is timely and wholesome command. Guide
and train your child properly, and you need seldom resort to coercion.
Training and leading are better than forcing. By the former you establish a
habit of systematic obedience which will soon become a pleasure to the
child. By the latter you jade and vex and burden him. But when the reins
will not do alone, then the whip must be resorted to. And the question at
once arises, what kind of a whip? We answer, not such as you use to your
horses and oxen in the team,--not the horse-whip. Corporeal punishment
should be used only as a last resort, when all other corrections have
failed, when the child becomes an outlaw, and his reprobate heart can be
reached only through the infliction of bodily pain. As a general thing it
is even then unavailing, because too mechanical to produce permanent good,
and not adapted to mental and moral reformation.
Sometimes, however, there is necessity in the use of this rod. "Every
child," says Dr. South, "has some brute in it, and some man in it, and just
in proportion to the brute we must whip it." When thus necessary we should
not shrink from this kind of correction. "It is pusillanimity, as well as
folly, to shrink from the crushing of the egg, but to wait composedly for
the hatching of the viper.
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