[185] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, ii.-ii. 101. 4.
[186] St. Matthew, xxiii. 9.
[187] St. Luke, xiv. 26.
[188] Ephesians, vi. 1 sqq. Colossians, iii. 20.
[189] Catechism of the Council of Trent, iii. 5. 1.
Ancient, deep-rooted ideas die slowly. Whilst among Teutonic peoples the grown-up child is recognised both by custom and law as independent of the parents, and the parental authority over minors is regarded merely in the light of guardianship,[190] the Roman notions of paternal rights and filial duties have to some extent survived in Latin countries, not only through the Middle Ages, but up to the present time. “Above the majesty of the feudal baron,” says M. Bernard, “that of the paternal power was held still more sacred and inviolable. However powerful the son might be, he would not have dared to outrage his father, whose authority was in his eyes always confounded with the sovereignty of command.”[191] Du Vair remarks, “Nous devons tenir nos pères comme des dieux en terre.”[192] Bodin wrote, in the later part of the sixteenth century, that, though the monarch commands his subjects, the master his disciples, the captain his soldiers, there is none to whom nature has given any command except the father, “who is the true image of the great sovereign God, universal father of all things.”[193] According to edicts of Henry III., Louis XIII., and Louis XIV., sons could not marry before the age of thirty, nor daughters before the age of twenty-five, without the consent of the father and mother, on pain of being disinherited.[194] And even now in France considerable power is accorded to parents, not only by custom and public sentiment, but by law. A child cannot quit the paternal residence without the permission of the father before the age of twenty-one, except for enrolment in the army.[195] For grave misconduct by his children the father has strong means of correction.[196] A son under twenty-five and a daughter under twenty-one could not until 1907 marry without parental consent;[197] and even when a man had attained his twenty-fifth year and a woman her twenty-first, both were still bound to ask for it, by a formal notification.[198]
[190] Starcke, La famille dans les différentes sociétés, p. 213 sqq.
[191] Bernard, quoted in Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology, France, p. 38.
[192] Du Vair, quoted by de Ribbe, Les familles et la société en France avant la Révolution, p. 51.
[193] Bodin, De republica, i. 4, p. 31.