The Family
My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother.” — i. 8.
THE first and great commandment is the fear of God;
and the second, which is next to it, and like to it, is
obedience to parents. Wherever the root is planted,
this is the first fruit which it bears.
The teaching of the Decalogue, and of the Proverbs, though circumstantially different, is essentially the same. On the one hand we have the legislator formally recording a code of laws; on the other, the aged, prosperous, and witty monarch collecting the best sayings that had been current at his court in that Augustan age of Hebrew literature. The cast of the writings corresponds with the position of the men; yet there are evident marks of the same Spirit as the teacher, and the same truth as the lesson. The ten commandments are divided into two tables. The first lays the foundation of all duty in our relation to God, and the second rears the superstructure in the various offices of love between man and his fellow. In the Decalogue the fear of God lies deepest as the root; and of the manifold duties which man owes to man, the branch that springs forth first is filial love. It is precisely the same here. The beginning of the commandment is, “Fear the Lord;” and the earliest outcome is, “My son, hear the instruction of thy father.” This verse of the Proverbs flows from the same well-spring that had already given forth the fifth commandment.
God honours his own ordinance, the family. He gives parents rank next after himself. Filial love stands near, and leans on godliness.
God is the author of the family constitution. He has conceived the plan, and executed it. Its laws are stamped in nature, and declared in the word. The equal numbers of the sexes born into the world, the feebleness of childhood at first, and the returning frailty of age, are so many features of the family institute left by the Creator indented on his work. They intimate not obscurely the marriage of one man with one woman, the support of children by parents, and the support of decayed parents by the children grown. There are many such laws deeply imprinted in nature; and in nature, too, a terrible vengeance is stored up, which bursts with unerring exactitude on the head of the transgressor.
One of the wonders of that little world in the dwelling is the adaptation by which all the powers of the elder children are exerted for the protection of the youngest. A boisterous and impulsive boy, able and willing to maintain his rights by force of arms against a rival older than himself, may be seen to check suddenly the embryo manhood that was spurting prematurely out, and put on a mimic motherliness, the moment that the infant appears, bent on a journey across the room, and tottering unsteady by. A condescending look, and a winning word, and a soft arm around, — all the miniature man is put forth in self-forgetting benevolence. How exquisitely contrived is this machinery in nature, both for protecting the feeble thing that receives the kindness, and softening the rude hand that bestows it! There is fine material here for parents to watch and work upon. The stem is soft, you may train it; the growth is rapid, you must train it now.
In proportion as men have adopted and carried out the ordinance in its purity, have the interests of society prospered. All deviations are at once displeasing to God and hurtful to men. The polygamy of Eastern peoples has made the richest portions of the earth like a howling wilderness. The festering sores opened in the body of the community by the licentiousness of individuals among ourselves, make it evident that if the course, which is now a too frequent exception, should become the general rule, society itself would soon waste away. It is chiefly by their effects in deranging the order of families that great manufactories deteriorate a community. Though the Socialist bodies, being so sickly and diseased in constitution, have never lived much beyond infancy amongst us; yet, as they are founded on a reversal of the family law, their effects, in as far as they have produced effects, are misery and ruin. The Romish priesthood, abjuring the divinely provided companionship of the household, and leaving no alternative between solitude and sin, have ever been like a pin loose in the circling machinery of society, tearing every portion as it passes by. In the constitution of nature there is a self-acting apparatus for punishing the transgression of the family laws. The divine institute is hedged all round. The prickles tear the flesh of those who are so foolish as to kick against them.
In practice, and for safety, keep families together as long as it is possible. When the young must go forth from a father’s house, let a substitute be provided as closely allied to the normal institution as the circumstances will admit. Let a sister be spared to live with the youths, and extemporize an off-shoot family near the great mart of business, with a dwelling that they may call their own. The cutting, though severed from the stem, being young and sapful, will readily strike root, and imitate the parent. This failing, let a lodging be found in a family where the youths will be treated as its members, participating at once in the enjoyments and restraints of a home. When the boy must needs be broken off from the parental stem, oh, throw him not an isolated atom on the sea of life that welters in a huge metropolis. Nor pen him up with a miscellaneous herd of a hundred men in the upper Hat of some huge mercantile establishment, a teeming islet lapsed into barbarism, with the waters of civilization circling all around. If you do not succeed in getting the severed branch engrafted into some stock that shall be an equivalent to the family, and so exercise the natural affections, the natural affections checked, will wither up within, or burst forth in wickedness. The youth will be ruined himself, and the ruined youth will be an element of corruption to fester in the heart of the society that neglected him.
Honour thy father and thy mother. This is the pattern shown in the mount. The closer we keep to it, the better will it be both for the individual and the community. God is wiser than men.
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right, and all right things are profitable. To violate the providential laws is both a crime and a blunder.
Love to parents ranks next under reverence to God. That finst and highest commandment is like the earth’s allegiance to the sun by general law; and filial obedience is like day and night, summer and winter, budding spring and ripening harvest, on the earth’s surface. There could be none of these sweet changes and beneficent operations of nature on our globe if it were broken away from the sun. So when a people burst the first and greatest bond — when a people cast off the fear of God, the family relations, with all their beauty and benefit, disappear. We may read this lesson in the fortunes of France. When the nation threw off the first commandment, the second went after it. When they repudiated the fear of God, they could not retain conjugal fidelity and filial love. Hence the wreck and ruin of all the relations between man and man. As well might they try to make a new world as to manage this one wanting the first and second, the primary and subordinate moral laws of its Maker.