I remark further, that the winter is especially trying to the moral
character of our young men, because some of their homes in winter are
especially unattractive. In summer they can sit on the steps, or have
a bouquet in the vase on the mantel; and the evenings are so short
that soon after gas-light they feel like retiring. Parents do not take
enough pains to make these long winter nights attractive.
It is strange that old people know so little about young people. One
would think that they had never been young themselves, but had been
born with their spectacles on. It is dolorous for young people to
spend the three or four hours of a winter's evening with parents
who sit talking over their own ailments and misfortunes, and the
nothingness of this world. How dare you talk such blasphemy? God was
busy six days in making the world, and has allowed it to hang six
thousand years on his holy heart; and that world hath fed you, and
clothed you, and shone on you for fifty years: and yet you talk about
the nothingness of this world! Do you expect the young people in
your family to sit a whole evening and hear you groan about this
magnificent, star-lighted, sun-warmed, shower-baptized, flower-strewn,
angel-watched, God-inhabited planet? From such homes young men make a
wild plunge into dissipation.
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