This little observation
shews the strength of a child's resentments, and its sagacity, at the
earliest age, in discovering who obliges, and who disobliges it: and
hence one may infer, how improper a person _he_ is, whom we would have
a child to love and respect, or by whose precepts we would have it
directed, to be the punisher of its faults, or to do any harsh or
disagreeable office to it.
For my own part, I beg to declare, that if the parent were not to
inflict the punishment himself, I think it much better it should be
given him, in the parent's presence, by the servant of the lowest
consideration in the family, and whose manners and example one would
be the least willing of any other he should follow. Just as the common
executioner, who is the lowest and most flagitious officer of the
commonwealth, and who frequently deserves, as much as the criminal,
the punishment he is chosen to inflict, is pitched upon to perform,
as a mark of greater ignominy, sentences intended as examples to deter
others from the commission of heinous crimes. The Almighty took this
method when he was disposed to correct severely his chosen people;
for, in that case, he generally did it by the hands of the most
profligate nations around them, as we read in many places of the Old
Testament.
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