SUPPORT GSPS |
The Gold, Silver, Precious Stones team appreciates your contributions in support of this work. Please send your correspondence to:
Gold, Silver, Precious Stones
P.O. Box 240
Harvest, AL 35749
|
|
|
|
"Some Rules for the Suppression of Sinful Anger," An Essay on Anger ch. VIII (1809)
Let us study the importance of domestic happiness and tranquility… Husbands should not be bitter against their wives; parents should not provoke their children to anger; masters must forbear threatening… The intemperate passion of superiors is often veiled under the excuse of necessary strictness, and maintaining of authority. But we should not ruin domestic peace by being always chiding; every little default should not put us into a flame; we should not be easily provoked; small offences should be passed by, and when such are committed as call for reproof, it should be given without heat and fury; a fiery and hasty carriage, scurrilous and indecent language, will at once sink our character, lessen our authority, and wound our family peace: noise and clamor will render us contemptible and ridiculous, and convince our domestics, that we are so far from being fit to govern others, that we are unable to govern ourselves.
A due expression of displeasure against what is wrong, and such as necessary to the formation of the offender, will very well comport with the meekness of wisdom. Awful gravity and composedness, tempered with mildness and good will, would preserve our authority, and command that respect which we wish to secure, more than noise, bluster, and wrathful chiding. We were once inferiors ourselves; and should treat those who are now under us, as we then wished to be treated. The happy medium between Eli’s indulgence, and Nabal’s brutal churlishness, should be studied by us, if we would preserve peace and good order in our dwellings. Of the latter it is said, He was such a churl, such a son of Belial, that a man could not speak to him. Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man rather than such a fury. There is no peace where he comes...
There is not, perhaps, a more mischievous source of anger and resentment in families, than the fond partiality of parents to their children. Of all the infirmities (says Dr. Hunter) to which our nature is subject, none is more common, none is more unreasonable, unwise, and unjust, none more fatal in its consequences to ourselves and others, than that of making a difference between one child and another. It discourages him or her who is slighted, and it frequently ruins the favorite. It sows the seeds of jealousy, anger, discord, and malice, which frequently produce innumerable mischief’s in families, which embitter the lives of both parents and children. It sets the father against the mother, and the mother against the father: the sister against the brother, and the brother against the sister. Parents ought to examine, and to watch over themselves carefully on this head. If they are unable to suppress the feelings of their own hearts, the expression thereof at least is in their power; and both policy and justice demand of them an equal distribution of their affection, their countenance, and their possessions. If there be a folly which more certainly than another punishes itself, it is this ill-judged distinction of which we are speaking.
Some of the best and wisest of men have erred in this particular. In the patriarchal age, we find both Isaac and Jacob caught in the same snare. Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison; and Rebekah loved Jacob: this disturbed the repose of Isaac’s family. It was not long before the effect of parental partialities appeared: a competition for precedency and the rights of primogeniture engaged the attention of the two brothers, and inflamed their minds against each other from their earliest years. The claims of each were supported respectively by the parents, according to favor, and the family was torn and distracted with internal dissention. The trifling circumstances of personal likeness, of beauty, and the like, which in themselves have neither merit nor demerit, have been known to establish distinctions in families which have been destructive of peace, and promotive of ruin. It is difficult indeed to be
|
|
