Timely Advice for Fathers

This passage of the book The Family by J.R. Miller needs to be thought upon and absorbed by every man who is a father, teacher, or pastor.

"Socrates used to say that he wondered how men who were so careful of the training of a colt were indifferent to the education of their own children. Yet even in these Christian days men are found -- men professing to be followers of Christ and to believe in the superiority of life itself to all things else -- who give infinitely more thought and pains to the raising of cattle, the growing of crops, the building up of business, than to the training of their children. Something must be crowded out of every earnest, busy life. No one can do everything that comes to his hand. But it will be a fatal mistake if any father allows his duties to his home to be crowded out. They should rather have the first place. Anything else had better be neglected than his children. Even religious work in the kingdom of Christ at large must not interfere with one's religious work in the kingdom of Christ in his home. No man is required by the vows and the spirit of his consecration to keep other men's vineyards so faithfully that he cannot keep his own. That a man has been a devoted pastor or a diligent church officer or a faithful Sunday-school superior teacher will not atone for the fact that he was an unfaithful father." (J.R. Miller, The Family p.88.)