Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 August 1883 — Good Manners. [ARTICLE]

Good Manners.

Perhaps good manners are not good morals, though the time was when the words morals and manners amounted to pretty much the same thing. When the New Testament was translated into English, in 1611, it taught its readers, and still teaches us, that “evil communications corrupt good manners.” And the revisers of 1880 have left the good manners to stand, changing only communications into company. So I have very high authority for saying that what I am driving at in this letter has something to do with the basis of character. A bad man may have the handsomest manners, the manners of a gentleman, and thereby the more thoroughly fitted to work all manner of misohief with greediness. He is a hypocrite in the world, as one who merely pretends to be a saint is a hypocrite in the church. But the beginning, middle, and end of good manners may be condensed into the divinely given principle of preferring others to ourselves; denying self for the happiness of another ; rendering to everyone his due, as superior, inferior, or equal. If mothers form the mainers of the children, they should feel the burden of responsibility. They may permit the inborn waywardness of the child to go unchecked, while he grows to be a pert, saucy, forward, disagreeable, dreadful boy, a terror to the neighborhood, and a nuisance to everybody but his doting mamma. She gives him a stick of candy when a stick of something not so sweet would do him more good. She coddles him into a curse that by and by will come upon her own head. Just as the twig, etc. Blood is great, and blessed are they who are well bprn. But more than. Wood, better than pedigree, is culture. Train up a, child in the way he should , : \ - '■sk,L it tt-eh ftjkSli . ’ ;,_e l i; . s • •' •• di; i. •;> iu£bei v .e . 4 ..,, v u. . a was pious, because he honored his father. It is a long way toward godliness to obey one’s parents. And happy is the parent and happy the child when love is returned with love. Thebe has been another walkingmatch. The only walking-matches that we now take any interest in are those that disappear mysteriously from our match-safe. That necessitates our blackmailing all our friends for ft li-ht for our cigarettes.