Hebrews 12:7

It is for chastening that ye endure; God dealeth with you as sons; for what son is there whom his father chasteneth not?

The chastening of sons by their fathers has gone out of style in the current generations; and, had these lines been addressed to the present age, they might well have been reversed, "What son is it whom his father does chasten?" Our age is the loser, however, in the abandonment of a principle old as humanity and which carries the sanction of divine approval. During a total eclipse of the sun in 1970, a beautiful young girl, age 13, was told by her mother not to look directly at the sun; but in the true spirit of a generation raised on Dr. Benjamin Spock's formula of permissiveness, the young lady gazed at the sun intently for several minutes, and was totally blinded for life by the experience. She had never been chastened, at least not effectively; and now she must endure the frightful penalty of a life of darkness. Ninety-one teenagers in New York City have perished from the use of drugs in five months; and for the vast majority of them, if indeed not for every one of them, the reason for their tragic death was lack of discipline and correction.

Speaking of Dr. Spock's influence upon the parents of America in this era, it is perhaps among the most shameful delusions of the present day. There are literally hundreds of child-abuse cases before the New York City judges every month, the average being over three hundred monthly; and, in the absolutely bestial conduct of parents involved, one may read the result of the permissive rearing of children. Sure, a DISCIPLINED parent may exhibit the self-control and humiliating subordination to the willful disobedience of a child brought up on the Spock principle; but when that child, in turn, becomes a parent, he does not merely by the biological experience of parenthood suddenly become a disciplined father or mother; no, indeed, such a parent is still the spoiled brat, as exemplified by the conduct of a father living three-quarters of a mile from where these words are written, who became vexed at the conduct of his little five year-old daughter, hung her up to the shower curtain rod and beat the flesh off her bones with the buckle end of his belt! The child's screams aroused neighbors who called the police, but the pitiful victim was dead on arrival at the hospital. Christian parents who believe our age has discovered a substitute for the discipline taught in the scriptures, a discipline that God himself enforces upon his own spiritual children, and which, in the verses before us, is presented as an eternal aspect of God's law, such parents will succeed only in multiplying the number of delinquents until, unless checked, the ruin of the whole civilized order could result.

Certainly, God does not intend, in a spiritual sense, that his children shall approach the ultimate test without the advantage of the corrective blessing of heavenly discipline.