conflicts which they endured, the fierce impulses of appetite and passion,
more or less connected with and dependent upon the material condition of
the bodily organs, under the onset of which their feeble moral sense, never
really brought into a condition of health and vigor, was over-borne. These
merciful views of the diseased condition and action of the soul in the
commission of crime are not only in themselves right views for man to take
of the crimes and sins of his fellow-man, but they lie at the foundation of
all effort that can afford any serious hope of promoting reformation.

This principle is eminently true in its application to children. They need
the influence of a kind and considerate sympathy when they have done wrong,
more, perhaps, than at any other time; and the effects of the proper
manifestation of this sympathy on the part of the mother will, perhaps, be
greater and more salutary in this case than in any other. Of course the
sympathy must be of the right kind, and must be expressed in the right way,
so as not to allow the tenderness or compassion for the wrong-doer to be
mistaken for approval or justification of the wrong.

_Case supposed_.

A boy, for instance, comes home from school in a state of great distress,
and perhaps of indignation and resentment, on account of having been
punished. Mothers sometimes say at once, in such a case, "I don't pity you
at all. I have no doubt you deserved it." This only increases the tumult of
commotion in the boy's mind, without at all tending to help him to feel a
sense of his guilt. His mind, still imperfectly developed, can not take
cognizance simultaneously of all the parts and all the aspects of a
complicated transaction. The sense of his wrong-doing, which forms in his
teacher's and in his mother's mind so essential a part of the transaction,
is not present in his conceptions at all. There is no room for it, so