It is a strange thing that Paul repeats this command even more fully in Colossians 3:21. ‘Fathers,’ he says, ‘do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart.’ Bengel says that the plague of youth is a ‘broken spirit’, discouraged by continuous criticism and rebuke and discipline that is too strict. The theologian David Smith thinks that Paul wrote out of bitter personal experience. He writes: ‘There is here a quivering note of personal emotion, and it seems as though the heart of the aged captive