Father’s Day
Each year on Father’s Day we celebrate our fathers and thank them for all the ways they bless us (a practice we should carry with us throughout the year!). In addition to being thankful for our own fathers, we can also be thankful for our Founding Fathers who were also great fathers to their own families.
For example, John Adams (who spent a good portion of the War for Independence away from his family) outlined to his precious wife, Abigail, the education their children should receive:
The education of our children is never out of my mind. Train them to virtue. Habituate them to industry [hard work], activity, and spirit [endurance]. Make them consider every vice as shameful and unmanly. Fire them with ambition to be useful. (August 1774)
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to a excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. (October 1775)
John Quincy Adams grew up under this instruction. In his many years of public service, he would often spend extended periods away from his four children. Desiring to advise them during these times of separation, he wrote a series of letters to his son on how to study the Bible. In one of these letters, Adams said,
I advise you, my son, in whatever you read, and most of all in reading the Bible, to remember that it is for the purpose of making you wiser and more virtuous. I have myself, for many years, made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year.
This advice from our Founding Fathers is definitely worth remembering. Happy Father’s Day!
