Household.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1193, 4 November 1882, Page 4 (Supplement)

Household.

PURE SPEECH. If there is anything which makes a person repulsive and loathsome to those of pure, clean mind, it is the indulgence in coarse, low speech. It is a fault which should meet with no quarter, because it is a heinous sin in God’s sight. “ Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” and the reverse of this is just as true. A God of purity will not receive into his house of light those who habitually indulge in such vileness. Parents cannot be too watchful or guarded in this respect. A child should be checked quite as quick for a low word ds for a profane one. He should be made to see its sinful, degrading tendency, no matter from whose lips he has caught it. A father’s example even should be no excuse, though it is hard making headway against such an example. A good mother will try, however, and never give over trying while life lasts. It is most emphatically true that “as is the mother, so is the daughter,” and so is the son to a great extent. She gives the key-note to the moral tone of the household. Never let a word or a thought cross your lips that could sully the white pages of a child’s heart. There should be no middle ground here : no parleying with the evil. A mother who loves her child as she does her life may blacken its soul to all eternity by her thoughtless speech. Do not let neighbourhood scandal be retailed in your child’s hearing! no, not if you offend the greatest gossip in the place; and I know it takes some courage to face her wrath, but it is better than to destroy your child’s purity. “ Never think the city has the whole monopoly of moral evil,” said a lady to me very sadly about a bright young nephew. “ The boy was ruined by the talk of the men in his father’s hay field.” If iniquity comes in like a flood, thus is it doubly needful to set up a standard against it. It is not hard; only make the fountain pure. “ Abhor that which is evil, and cleave to that which is good.” Never allow a low jest in your presence to pass unrebuked, and never a word from your own lips that is not pure and sweet. However bad the world may look to the children when they go out in it, let there be one bright, fair memory of perfect purity to which they can always revert. Let “my mother” be the synomyn of all that was excellent and of good report, in standing refutation of the slur that there is no true goodness in the world.