Parenting & Family Quote by Roy L. Smith

A clergyman admitting that sermons lose to behavior is less a platitude than a quiet indictment. Roy L. Smith is talking to fellow adults, not children, and the pronoun choice gives him away. "We are apt to forget" spreads the blame politely, the way clergy often do when they want correction without open scolding. It also implies the forgetting is habitual, not occasional: a recurring moral lapse dressed up as absentmindedness.

The line works because it punctures the comforting fantasy that values can be transmitted like information. "Preaching" suggests not just formal sermons but the whole adult repertoire of advice, warnings, and moralizing. Against that, "examples" names the unchosen curriculum kids receive: how you speak to a cashier, how you handle anger, whether you keep promises when it costs you. Smith is highlighting a power dynamic adults prefer to ignore. Children have no authority, but they have constant access. They watch the gaps between professed belief and lived practice, then build their ethics out of the pattern.

The subtext is especially pointed coming from an early 20th-century Protestant context, when public respectability and private conduct often coexisted uneasily. Smith is steering religious life away from performance and toward embodiment, where hypocrisy can't hide behind eloquence. It's a pastoral warning with a cultural edge: the credibility of any moral system depends less on how loudly it is announced than on how consistently it is enacted.