Take your mannerisms, your condescensions,
your affectations, your moralisings, and all your insincerities to your
debauched equals, but bring your truest and your best to your child.
Unless you do so, you will be sure to lay yourself open to a look that
will suddenly go through you, and that will swiftly convey to you that
your child sees through you and despises you and your conversation too.
'You should not only have talked to your children of their danger,' said
Charity, 'but you should have shown them their danger.' Yes, Charity;
but a man must himself see his own and his children's danger too, before
he can show it to them, as well as see it clearly at the time he is
trying to show it to them. And how many fathers, do you suppose, have
the eyes to see such danger, and how then can they shew such danger to
their children, of all people? Once get fathers to see dangers or
anything else aright, and then you will not need to tell them how they
are to instruct and impress their children. Nature herself will then
tell them how to talk to their children, and when Nature teaches, all our
children will immediately and unweariedly listen.
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