the weaker yields to the stronger,--almost as matter yields to force? For
what reason is he to do this?"

"Why, because I know what is best for him, and what is right; and he does
not."

"Ah! that is a very different thing. He is, then, to do the thing that you
tell him to do, because that thing is right and is needful for him; you
are his guide on a road over which you have gone, and he has not; you are
an interpreter, a helper; you know better than he does about all things,
and your knowledge is to teach his ignorance."

"Certainly, that is what I mean. A pretty state of things it would be if
children were to be allowed to think they know as much as their parents.
There is no way except to break their wills in the beginning."

"But you have just said that it is not to your will as will that he is to
yield, but to your superior knowledge and experience. That surely is not
'breaking his will.' It is of all things furthest removed from it. It is
educating his will. It is teaching him how to will."

This sounds dangerous; but the logic is not easily turned aside, and there
is little left for the advocate of will-breaking but to fall back on some
texts in the Bible, which have been so often misquoted in this connection
that one can hardly hear them with patience. To "Children, obey your
parents," was added "in the Lord," and "because it is right," not "because
they are your parents." "Spare the rod" has been quite gratuitously
assumed to mean "spare blows." "Rod" means here, as elsewhere, simply
punishment. We are not told to "train up a child" to have no will but our
own, but "in the way in which he should go," and to the end that "when he