| The Beauty of Self Control |
Chapter 2 |
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The first work of Christ in many lives is ploughing. The lives have not been cultivated. They have been left untilled. Or, like the wayside ground, they have been trodden down into hardness. Many people treat their lives as if they were meant to be open commons instead of beautiful gardens. They do not fence them in to protect them, and so beasts pasture on them, tramping over them, children play upon them, and men drive their light carriages and their heavy wagons across them making roadways hard as rock. We readily understand this in agriculture, and it is little more difficult to understand it in life culture. A good woman said that God wanted her heart to be a garden filled with sweet flowers. A garden needs constant care. Our lives should be watched continually, that the soil shall always be tender, so that all manner of lovely things may grow in them, but there are many lives that are not thus cared for and cultivated. They are unfenced, and all kinds of feet go treading over them. No care is given to the companions who are allowed admittance into the field; soon the gentle things are destroyed and the tender, mellow soil has become hard. Those who are entrusted with the care of children should never fail to think of their responsibility for the influences which are allowed to touch them. On a tablet placed in the high school building at Sag Harbour, Long Island, are inscribed these words by Mrs. Russell Sage: “I would like to have the people impressed with their obligations as guardians of children, to see to it that their training and education be such that in the future of this little hamlet, as in the past, its good women and noble men may enrich the world.”
For the lack of such care many men and women become hardened, without capacity to receive tender impressions. They have large capacities for rich, beautiful life and for splendid service, but they are permitted to read all manner of books and to have all kinds of amusements and to see all kinds of amusements and to see all kinds of evil life, and they grow up without beauty, really useless and without loveliness. They need to be ploughed and ploughed deep that they may be made fertile.
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