You can reflect with pleasure upon your conduct. When
your parents are in the grave, you will feel no remorse of conscience
harrowing your soul for your past unkindness. And when you die
yourselves, you can anticipate a happy meeting with your parents, in
that heavenly home, where sin and sorrow, and sickness and death, can
never come.
God has, in almost every case, connected suffering with sin. And
there are related many cases in which he has, in this world, most
signally punished ungrateful children. I read, a short time since, an
account of an old man, who had a drunken and brutal son. He would
abuse his aged father without mercy. One day, he, in a passion,
knocked him flat upon the floor, and, seizing him by his gray hairs,
dragged him across the room to the threshold of the door, to cast him
out. The old man, with his tremulous voice, cried out to his
unnatural son, "It is enough--it is enough. God is just. When I was
young, I dragged my own father in the same way; and now God is giving
me the punishment I deserve."
Sometimes you will see a son who will not be obedient to his mother.
He will have his own way, regardless of his mother's feelings. He has
grown up to be a stout and stubborn boy, and now the ungrateful
wretch will, by his misconduct, break the heart of that very mother,
who, for months and years, watched over him with a care which knew no
weariness.
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