1. Learn to govern yourselves, and to be gentle and patient.

2. Guard your tempers, especially in seasons of ill-health, and trouble, and soften them by prayer, penitence, and a sense of your own short comings and errors.

3. Never speak or act in anger, until you have prayed over your words or acts, and concluded that Christ would have done so, in your place.

4. Remember that valuable as is the gift of speech, the gift of silence is often much more so.

5. Do not expect too much from others, but remember that all have an evil nature, whose developments we must expect, and which we should forbear and forgive, as we often desire forbearance and forgiveness ourselves.

6. Never retort a sharp or angry word. It is the second word that makes the quarrel.

7. Beware of the first disagreement.

8. Learn to speak in a gentle tone of voice.

9. Learn to say kind and pleasant things whenever an opportunity offers.

10. Study the character of each one, and sympathize with them in their troubles, however small.

11. Do not neglect little things, if they can affect the comfort of others in the smallest degree.

12. Avoid moods and pets, and fits of sulkiness.

13. Learn to deny yourself, and to prefer others.

14. Beware of meddlers and tale-bearers.

15. Never charge a bad motive, if a good one is conceivable.

16. Be gentle but firm with children.

17. Do not allow your children to be away from home at night, without knowing where they are.

18. Do not allow them to go where they please on the Sabbath.

19. Do not furnish them much spending money.

20. Remember the grave, the judgment seat, and the scenes of eternity, and so order your home on earth, that you shall have a home in heaven.

— T.V. Moore, God’s University; or, The Family Considered as a Government, a School, and a Church, the Divinely-Appointed Institute for Training the Young for the Life That Now is, and For That Which is to Come (1855), pp. 88-89