We open this second division of the Law with the duties of man to man; and at its head stands the commandment of the household. I must repeat here the remark of eminent scholars, that each of the original tables probably contained five statutes; and thus the maxim we now consider was directly joined with the four concerning the worship of God. Such a view gives us indeed a new insight into the Hebrew religion, which linked the first of social truths with a divine faith; it is the anticipation of his Gospel, who has taught us that the love of parent and children is the type of our holier bond in the family of Christ. But there is a yet further thought in the words of this “commandment with promise.” That “thy days maybe long in the land.” Those earlier commandments tower above us like the lonely heights, where Moses communed with God; but as we read this sentence, we see rise on the eyes of the lawgiver the landscape of far Judea, with its laughing fields, the voice of children and the home of calm old age. These words suggest the whole line of our reasoning on this subject. Filial reverence is the fountain of all affections, all duties; it flows like the river of Eden, parted into its branching heads, through every channel of human life.
It is then the family, as the institution which God has implanted in our nature, and Christianity has hallowed, that we are to consider. I know indeed no richer study than thus to trace its growth. I have no theories to offer you. It is the simplest of facts. There has been no more favorite field for our philosophers than that of the origin of human government. Some have fancied that men met together in formal compact; others have held the state of nature that of a pack of wolves, at last brought together by self-interest to choose some kingly wolf, who could keep the peace; and we have to-day our sages, so enamored of their researches into comparative anatomy, that they can pass by all the nobler facts of social history, and find the primitive man in some anthropoid ape. Yet as the grandest laws of God are revealed in the nearest example, we learn more than volumes of such theory in the life of our own households. Government began with the family. It is no artificial thing. It was not imposed by force. There is no state of nature that goes before it; but as all our discoveries in organic life lead to the primary cell, so all social formations are only the enlargement of this little human embryo. We need no other truth than that he, who gave us this moral being, made us to dwell in mutual dependence; and thus the germ of all authority lies in the relation of parent and child, in the care it calls forth, in the weakness of infancy, and the natural reverence that springs from the heart. Open the Book of the Genesis; you see the patriarch Abraham dwelling in the tent with his children; you see this household passing into tribes, linked in a bond of brotherhood, reverencing the father of them all, who is priest and head; and you trace further on a Mosaic commonwealth. History repeats the same early chapter in the Arab of the desert to-day, or in the beginnings of ancient Rome. “Society in primitive times,” it is said by one of the wisest of English jurists, in his work on Ancient Law, “was not a collection of individuals; it was an aggregation of families.” Among all early peoples the law of the household is thus supreme; it embraces all duties, and reaches to the nicest detail of courtesy. The oldest laws of China are as rich in their family wisdom as any in the world. Filial reverence was the corner-stone of the state. I well remember with what surprise I saw the son of a venerable Parsee, himself a man of fifty, wait behind his father’s chair during a long interview; it was a vestige of the stately manners of the East, strangely contrasting with our civilized rudeness. But if we will find the finest examples in the past, we must turn to those scenes in the Old Testament, where the aged patriarch lays his hands on his eldest born in token of his birth-right, or the twelve gather reverently about the bed of the dying Jacob to receive his blessing. In this household life, interwoven with all their social habits, the heart of the Hebrew was nursed; and in many a quiet home, like that of Nazareth, there grew the blossoming graces of childhood, that made this history so pure amidst all its decays.
But we must pass from this earlier view to the new life of Christianity, if we would know its nobler influence. Many pure affections and virtues grew without doubt in a heathen civilization. But the family authority was almost a despotism; the father had power of life and death over the child, and woman was little more than a slave. The one great feature of all social progress, we are told by the jurist already cited, has been the recognition of the rights of the person, instead of absolute family dependence. Here it was that the religion of the Gospel had its living power, and I ask you to study this wonderful fact in its early history. As we look back on the state of society at that time, we are struck everywhere with the decay of those fair examples of chastity, of maternal virtue, of household strength which bloomed in the old Roman commonwealth. Family life had withered, because it had not in its ancient pagan form those elements which could preserve its influence amidst the shameless sensuality of the world. The public talk of the forum, the theater, the games, the busy out-of-door existence, such as you see to-day in Southern Europe, were everything; nor was there a purer tide flowing into the great city, as from the country homes of England and America, to cleanse and freshen it. Religion was a brilliant temple pageantry. Thus, as in all pagan lands, you have the same striking facts; the degradation of woman and the degradation of man with it. This it was that the religion of Christ changed. It taught, as its first truth, that God was our Father, and all men one brotherhood in Christ. What a revelation was this beyond all that the pagan mind had known! The paternal power was no longer a despotism to the believer; the father knew that he had a Father in heaven, and that his child was no serf, but the household tie was a type of the holier family of God. Read that clear utterance of the household law in St. Paul: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord; fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.” The Gospel cherished above all else the family authority; yet it hallowed, sweetened, enlarged it. It nursed the virtues of the household. It made woman the companion of the heart and home; it hallowed marriage; it taught the love of Christ and the brethren, contentment, industry, frugality, sacrifice, and charity to the poor. What picture so fair as in the letters of that time of its fresh, healthful life; that “church in the house,” breathing the soul of the early religion? The kingdom came without observation, without noise; and a new home-born, home-bred society grew in the midst of the dying civilization.
[April 8.]
THE LAW OF THE HOUSEHOLD.
In this light, then, we can understand, brethren, the place of the Christian family, as always the first of social institutions. Such is the view I wish to urge, because I believe that, far more than we suppose, this law of the family enters into the most real questions of our time as to popular education or social reform. We live in a day of theories; and in such a day we are most apt to forget the simple truths, which, in Coleridge’s words, “are so true, that they lie bed-ridden by the side of the most exploded errors.” I speak no mere sentiment; I address myself to the plain sense and Christian experience of all. It is the problem that presses on us to-day more than ever, when we look at the mingled good and evil of our modern world; when we enter one of our great cities, where wealth glitters as if there were no suffering, yet a step apart there lurks a world of beggary and crime, which our Christianity has hardly pierced, although it has sent a Livingston into the heart of Africa;—what is the hope of Christian more than pagan progress, of a Paris or New York more than a Rome? I give the answer, which I think all history as well as the Gospel gives. The purity of the household is the salt of our civilization. I know no other answer. Need I then, state the ground on which such a truth rests? The only lasting influence which can preserve or heal the social body is one that works from the root. We can not, with dreamers like Rousseau, believe the savage better than the civilized state. Art and science bring manifold vices with the good, yet we can never grapple with the sins of our day by vague railing against luxury. In the decaying age of the Roman world a Jerome retired into his cave at Bethlehem; but his idle despair did not cure the evil. We often indulge the same false humor. We speak of a London or a New York as the swollen ulcer of society, but we forget that we may as well talk of a body without its brain; that it is in mutual circulation, the country feeding the city with fresh blood, the city pouring it back enriched in its double circuit, the life is maintained; and thus while we see the vices, we should see also the enlarged activities, the myriad callings for the poor, the treasures of art and culture for all, the uncounted charities walking in every haunt of sorrow or sin. But this growth of civilization has in it no self-preserving might. A refined culture is no safeguard against our moral diseases. We repeat often that this American people is abler to keep its freedom and virtue, because of the education of all: yet it is one of those surface truths that may cover a fallacy. I believe heartily in popular education. But there is a more knowing vice as well as virtue. The mob of Paris is more intelligent than the country boor; but it is a witty and polished animal. Such training, without a deeper root, only quickens the weeds in the rank field of our time, and chokes the public conscience.
Whatever, then, the form of our civilization, it must depend on the tone of our household life for its healthy growth, because this precedes all else in its shaping power. All the germs of personal character, truth, purity, honesty, reverence of law, must be implanted in this soil. The state rests on it. The church rests on it, and its teaching is barren, unless it begin with home nurture. We may make what laws we will for the suppression of vice, what plans we will of education, what better methods of industry; but what are they without the education of the character? What is our most perfect theory of government, unless there be a self-governed people? What are commercial rules, if there be no conscience of integrity and honor? Study this truth in its widest bearings. Our time is marked by its noble efforts for reform. We hail each healthy improvement in the condition of the poor, the opening of new channels of labor, the breaking down of false monopolies.
It is thus, my friends, we are to learn the bearing of such a truth on our own land and time. We can not study the growth of society, especially in our great cities, without observing that there are many influences, such as I have already described in the old Pagan civilization, which tend to impair the purity of home. The family habits decay in the larger world of sensual splendor. It is becoming a hard thing for our young men of fashion to afford the luxury of marriage; and our young women learn that the aim of life is a rich husband, who can supply the gold for the wardrobe and the glitter of an establishment. We have imported from abroad within these few years many of the loose ideas of modern Epicurism. But there are, besides, influences peculiar to our American society, which are developing a type of precocious youth not pleasant to look upon. I know not whether it be the abuse of our free institutions, that begets our style of manners: but we are too fast losing the habits of home authority and filial reverence. It has been truly said of us, that we have as much family government as ever, but the young govern the parents. We have no children now-a-days. Our infants leap from the nursery into the drawing-room; and while abroad a son or a daughter has hardly left the retreat of home, here they are already veterans in the ways of fashion, and society is quite surrendered to them. Many of our foreign visitors have repeated the remark of De Tocqueville, that an American girl has more of self-poised ease, but is wanting in the fresh charm seen so often in the young maidens of England or France. I doubt not there is a better side to this. I would not keep them, as is too often done abroad, shut in nursery or convent without the education of the character. I love the intelligence, the generous freedom of youth, but I wish we might not lose with these the modest heart, the simple tastes of past years. It maybe the passing excess of our national childhood, but it is not to be flattered as it is too often. I know that I am very old-fashioned in my ideas, yet it may be well if we soberly reflect on these things. We may grow in wealth and all the arts of social culture, but let these fast habits of the time, this whirl of our modern life eat into the heart of our home piety, and the whole body must die of its own gangrenes.
In that conviction I urge on you, my friends, your personal obligation. Who of us can enough appreciate its meaning? Who of us, if he could keep afresh the feeling of awe and tenderness with which he looked on the face of his first-born infant, and felt what an undiscovered world was opened to him, who would ever need to learn his duty? What a work it is, how ceaseless, how growing at each step, how delicate in all its adaptations, how asking all our love, our thoughtfulness, our patience! I offer you no system of education. I repeat only the principle, which I thank God is the root of all wholesome teaching, that a Christian godliness is the growth of the whole character; and therefore it begins with the recognition of the child as a new-born member of the family of Christ; and plants its simplest truths in the moral affections, and blends them with the real duties of life. This is sound sense and piety. This, in Wordsworth’s happy line, is
Pure religion breathing household laws.