Third—The obedience which parent and child alike owe to the moral law, and which it is the parent’s duty to teach the child to pay.
If mothers would but keep these three kinds of obedience clear and distinct in their minds, I think much of the supposed difficulty of the problem would disappear. And, if children as they grow up would likewise discriminate between them, many of their troubles would be relieved.
For the first, the excellent old Dr. Thomas Brown lays down (Lectures on Ethics, p. 287) a principle which seems to me exactly to fit the case. He says that parents “should impose no restraint which has not for its object some good greater than the temporary evil of the restraint itself.” For an infant, the restraint is no evil; and at that age everything must be a matter of obedience, the babe possessing no sense or experience for self-guidance. But, as childhood advances, so should freedom advance; and, even if the little boy or girl does now and then learn by sharp experience, the lesson will generally be well worth the cost: whereas the evils of over-restraint have no compensation. Each one is bad in itself, checking the proper development of character, chilling the spirits, and also in a cumulative way becoming increasingly mischievous, as the miserable sense of being fettered becomes confirmed.
In all this matter of the child’s own welfare, the mother’s aim ought to be to become the life-long counselor of her child; and a counselor is (by the very hypothesis) one who does not persist in claiming authority. Nobody thinks of consulting another who may conclude their “advice” by saying, “And now I order you to do as I have advised.” To drop, as completely and as early as possible, the tone of command, and assume that of the loving, sympathetic, ever disinterested guide and friend,—that is, I think, the true wisdom of every mother, as it was that of my own. Of course, there are cases so grave (especially where girls who little understand the need of caution are concerned) that it is absolutely necessary, nay, the mother’s pressing duty, to prohibit her daughter from running into danger. To apply Brown’s rule, the evil of the restraint is more than counter-balanced by immunity from deadly peril. Perhaps it is one of the principal causes of the dissatisfaction of young girls with parental control that they do not and can not understand what horrible dangers may overtake them in the still foul condition of society.
Second—It is too little remembered that a parent has a moral right to exact obedience as a form of service from his child. The parent has, in strictest ethical sense, the first of all claims on the child’s special benevolence; i. e., on his will to do good. The double ties of gratitude and of closest human relationship make it the duty of the child to pay that sacred debt from first to last; and it is entirely fit and greatly for its benefit that the parent should claim that duty. The parent’s direction in such cases, properly translated, is not a command, to which the response is blind obedience, but an indication of the way in which the person to whom the debt is due desires that it should be paid. There ought to be nothing in the slightest degree harsh or dictatorial in such direction. On the contrary, I can not but think that the introduction by parents of much greater courtesy to their children would be an immense advantage in this and other cases. We all ask our servants politely to do for us the services which they have contracted to do, and for which we pay them. How much more kindly and courteously ought we to ask of our children to perform services due by the blessed and holy debt of nature and gratitude, and which ought, each one, to be a joy to the child as well as to the parent! When it is rightly demanded and cheerfully paid, how excellent and beautiful to both is this kind of filial duty! When, for example, we see little girls of the working classes taught to carry their father’s dinner to the field as soon as they can toddle, and helping their mother to “mind the baby,” even if it be a “little Moloch” of a baby, we witness both the fulfillment of a legitimate claim on the part of the parents, and a most beneficent moral training for the child. I think this sort of service of the child is sadly lacking among the richer classes, and that it would be an excellent thing if mothers, however wealthy, found means of making their children more useful to themselves. Nothing can be worse for a child than to find everything done for her, and never to be called upon to do anything for anybody else. Indeed, any fine-natured child, like a dog, will find much more real pleasure in being of use, or fancying it is so, than in being perpetually pampered and amused. Of course there would be moral limits to such claims on the parent’s part, as, e. g., when they would interfere with the child’s health or education. But there is no natural termination in point of age to the parent’s right to give such directions for his own service. On the contrary, the time when the adult son or daughter has come into the full possession of his or her faculties, while the parent is sinking into the infirmities of age, is the very time when filial duty is most imperative in its obligation; and the fact that aged parents rarely attempt to give to adult sons and daughters the same directions for their comfort as they gave them when children shows how little the real nature of these sacred rights and duties is commonly understood.
Third—There is the obedience which both parent and child owe to the eternal moral law; and this obedience again ought to be kept perfectly distinct from that which is exacted either for the child’s personal welfare or the parent’s convenience. The old and most important distinction between a thing which is malum in se and a thing which is only malum prohibitum ought never to be lost sight of. Even in a very little child, I think, a moral fault, such as a lie, or cruelty to an animal, or vindictiveness toward its companions, ought to be treated with gravity and sadness; and, as the child grows, an importance ought to be attached to such faults wholly incommensurate with any other sort of error, such as indolence about lessons or the like. The one aim of the parent must be to make profound impression of the awfulness and solemnity of moral good and moral evil.
But even here the difficulty haunts us, when is this enforcement of obedience to moral laws to cease? So long as a child is absolutely compelled to do right by sheer force and terror of punishment, its moral freedom can have no scope, and its moral life consequently can not even begin. It can not acquire the virtue which results from free choice. All that the parent can do (and it is an indispensable preparation for virtue, though not virtue itself) is first to teach the child what is right,—to draw out its latent moral sense, and inspire it with the wish to do right,—and then to help its steps in the path which has been pointed out. Once a child grasps the idea of duty, and begins in its little way to try to “be good,” and displays the indescribably touching phenomena of childlike penitence and restoration, it becomes surely the most sacred task for the mother to aid such efforts—silently, indeed, for the most part, and too reverentially to talk much about it—with tenderest sympathy. It would be no kindness, of course, but cruelty, to open up hastily ways of liberty before moral strength has been gained to walk in them. The “hedging up the way with thorns” is a divine precaution, which a mother may well imitate. But the principle must be, as in the case of directions in matters not moral, gradually and systematically to exchange directions and orders for counsels and exhortations.
And here, in closing these, perhaps, too tedious remarks on the moral training of children, I shall add a word which may possibly startle some who hear me,—Beware that, in earnestly seeking your child’s moral welfare, you do not force the moral nature with hot-house culture. To be a sturdy plant, it must grow naturally, and not too rapidly. It seems as if it were not intended by Providence that this supreme part of our human nature should be developed far in childhood and early youth, lovely as are the blossoms it sometimes then bears,—too often to drop into an untimely grave, or wither away in the heat of manhood without fruit. Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, undoubtedly made a great mistake in this matter, as one of his very best disciples, Arthur Hugh Clough, was able in later years to see. Mothers should not be unhappy, if boys are honorable and kindly and affectionate, if they should, at fifteen, prefer a game of football to a visit of charity; and I should not blame at all severely any of my young friends, if such there be here present, who may be at this moment wishing that she were playing lawn-tennis, instead of sitting still to hear a dull dissertation on moral philosophy!
But, when all is done that can be done by human wisdom to help the moral growth of the young, there is a vast space left for the other and easier parental duty of providing for their happiness. Of course, to nine parents out of ten, high and low, it is the joy and delight of their lives to make their children as happy as possible. There is no virtue in this. Nature (or, let us say frankly, God) has so made us that in middle life nearly all direct pleasures to be enjoyed on our own account begin to pall. We are too busy or too indifferent to care much for a score of things which, when we were younger, we found quite entrancing.
“It is the one great grief of life to feel all feelings die.”