The Man Who Mars | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · April 29, 1880

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 18

The Man Who Mars.

This evening, while walking home from the office, we saw a little curly-headed boy, about nine years old, standing in an alley-way, between two old carts, crying bitterly. No one was near him. He was sobbing as though his heart was tortured with grief. Men and women passed by, only turning their heads to see. Said an elegantly dressed lady ahead of us to her gentleman companion, when he proposed to stop and see what ailed the little fellow,—“No, you sha’n’t. It’s only some dirty little brat not worth minding.”

The two passed on. The woman, a snob; the man, not even a dog; for the dogs do not desert the poor.

“What is the matter, little fellow?”

“Please—please—please, sir, I don’t want to tell!”

“Why not?”

“I’m—I’m ashamed to.”

“Ashamed to? It can’t be that a little fellow with such a good face as yours has done something you are ashamed of. Tell me what the trouble is. All little boys, and big boys, and men, too, get into trouble and have to be helped out.”

“It’s my father, sir. He scolds me all the time. He does not love me, and always speaks cross to me. The boy who lives next door is never scolded by his father, and he’s no bigger than I am, and no better than I try to be.”

“What does your mother say?”

“She is good to me, but father scolds her, too. He don’t love any of us, and I’m ashamed to live. Indeed I am sir.”

The world is only too full of such children and such fathers. Men who mar the beautiful!

Suppose we should go into the house of a neighbor as he was moving in new furniture to fill up and make beautiful his place of residence. To help him put things in place would be manly and right. But would it be right to find fault with him—to pick at this, to scratch on that, to mark that piano a little, then to scratch, even with the point of a pin, the chairs, tables, stands, and all the furniture he was trying to make a part and parcel of himself, so to speak? Just think how little time must elapse before that man would dislike us, then hate us. Marring, constantly marring; spoiling and defacing the beautiful; breaking little shrubs, pinching little buds to spoil or kill the flowers behind them; making marks, letters, figures, scratches, and disfigurings on all there was of the beautiful.

One man in this way could despoil a hundred homes; could live to much evil; could do more harm than a hundred men, always at work, could do good; could spoil beautiful furniture faster than an army of men could make or finish.

If this scratching and marring were done by the man in his own home, what sense for his wife and children to try to make it beautiful? What is the use of having a home, when it is not attractive?

So with children. They are in one sense but bits of furniture, easily kept in order, easily spoiled and made cross, ugly, peevish, ill-natured; very easily taught that brutality and manhood are the same thing, whereas true manhood and real lovable dignity are shown by love, kindness, thoughtful care, and a growing disposition to make every one about you happy, better, more gentle of heart and beautiful in disposition.

The world is full of men who mar, and drive back, and trample under foot all that is budding to the beautiful in the hearts of wives and children. The heart is a garden. Plant it with kind words and gently spoken requests, and see how choicest flowers and most delicious fruit of careful love will reward the considerate husbandman. Austerity is not manhood. Gruff, harsh, hastily spoken words chill hearts, and drive back into cold, dark corners the tendrils of affection, which, if helped to grow, go down with a man to his grave, bearing him gently in their embrace, to live and bloom with him over yonder in the garden of renewed life. . . .

There is love without loss of dignity. There is obedience to be had without gruffness. There is allegiance, true, loving and lasting, to be had without commanding like a tyrant. It is not true life to scratch, and mar, and bruise, in the mistaken idea that children must be hardened to be fitted for contact with the world. . . .

Gently spoken requests are better than hard, harsh commands. They draw out feelings of love, affection, kindness, and consideration, which beautify life from the cradle to the grave. The work of the parent is one of responsibility. He should not seek to curb, to hold back, to keep down, to make timid, so much as to draw out, encourage, help on, guide aright, and thus assist the young soul to a smoother life.

The little boy we saw to-night in tears is lonely; his heart is hungry. His life is cold, cheerless, because the stern, gruff father wants it known that he is master of his own household, and must be obeyed. So this child goes on in life without sympathy from one who should show it the most. He is learning that he has no home; that the cold world is warmer and more kind than the harsh, scolding father who should teach him full love and confidence. He should never be made to blush for the words and manners of the father who doubtless wants to do right and to train up his child in the way it should go, but who, perhaps, never lovingly taught, knows not the best way. Men are often kind and polite to those they fear, when they should be kind and considerate to all, especially to those who can, by their words, be made sad or happy from birth to the final Saturday night.—Selected.