There was once a river full of water, bright and sparkling in the sunshine. The river had buoyant spirits, was careless and rollicking. It used to like to leave its banks, and roam off here and there through the woods and over the fields. Sometimes, when the passion seized it, it would swell to an angry flood, burst all barriers, and rage for miles over the country, tearing down trees, destroying the crops, overturning the houses, and drowning hundreds of people. No one can tell the mischief this river did because it would not stay inside its banks.
At last the government of the United States decided to stop all of this evil. Boats were sent with great dredges to deepen the bed of the river. An army of men was set to work with spades to cut trenches and straighten the river where it was crooked. Where the banks were low, great dikes of dirt were built to keep the river in, and where the banks were weak, long stone walls were made to strengthen them. Where the current moved too slowly, jetties were thrown out from the bank to confine the current and make it more swift.
In all of these ways the river was shut in and made to toe the mark. It felt as if it were in a strait-jacket indeed, and mourned like a captive in chains.
But when, after a while, the river saw the farms that it had made desolate covered with rich crops again, and the houses rebuilt that it had torn down, and the villages it had laid waste filled again with happy people, and when it noticed how finely the great boats were now carried along by its deep and regular current, then the river came to be very proud of its great banks, and no longer called them a prison to hem it in, but a home in which it could do the best and happiest work.
So it will be with us, children, if we fling ourselves out of the straight and narrow way which the Father has made for us to walk in. Whatever we do will make us unhappy, and make every one around us wretched. But if we keep in that way, just as the river within its bed at last, we shall learn to be thankful even for the punishments by which God restrains us, when we see how much better are his ways than the ways that we would have chosen.