Obedience is the law of childhood. It is, in great part, the child’s religion, to be practised “in the Lord.” The reverence and love, full of a sweet mystery, which the Christian child feels towards its Saviour and heavenly King, add new sacredness to the claims of father and mother. Jesus Christ, the Head over all things, is the orderer of the life of boys and girls. His love and His might guard the little one in the tendance of its parents. The wonderful love of parents to their offspring, and the awful authority with which they are invested, come from the source of human life in God.
The Latin pietas impressed a religious character upon filial duty. This word signified at once dutifulness towards the gods, and towards parents and kindred. In the strength of its family ties and its deep filial reverence lay the secret of the moral vigour and the unmatched discipline of the Roman commonwealth. The history of ancient Rome affords a splendid illustration of the fifth commandment.
For this is right, says the apostle, appealing to the instincts of natural religion. The child’s conscience begins here. Filial obedience is the primary form of duty. The loyalties of after life take their colour from the lessons learnt at home, in the time of dawning reason and incipient will. Hard indeed is the evil to remove, where in the plastic years of childhood obedience has been associated with base fear, with distrust or deceit, where it has grown sullen or obsequious in habit. From this root of bitterness there spring rank growths of hatred toward authority, jealousies, treacheries, and stubbornness. Obedience rendered “in the Lord” will be frank and willing, careful and constant, such as that which Jesus rendered to the Father.
St Paul reminds the children of the law of the Ten Words, taught to them in their earliest lessons from Scripture. He calls the command in question “a first [or chief] commandment”—just as the great rule, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” is the first commandment; for this is no secondary rule or minor precept, but one on which the continuance of the Church and the welfare of society depend. It is a law fundamental as birth itself, written not on the statute-book alone but on the tables of the heart.
Moreover, it is a “command in promise”—that takes the form of promise, and holds out to obedience a bright future. The two predicates—“first” and “in promise”—as we take it, are distinct. To merge them into one blunts their meaning. This commandment is primary in its importance, and promissory in its import. The promise is quoted from Exodus xx. 12, as it stands in the Septuagint, where the Greek Christian children would read it. But the last clause is abbreviated; St Paul writes “upon the earth” in place of “the good land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” This blessing is the heritage of dutiful children in every land. Those who have watched the history of godly families of their acquaintance, will have seen the promise verified. The obedience of childhood and youth rendered to a wise Christian rule, forms in the young nature the habits of self-control and self-respect, of diligence and promptitude and faithfulness and kindliness of heart, which are the best guarantees for happiness and success in life. Through parental nurture “godliness” secures its “promise of the life that now is.”
Children are exhorted to submission: fathers to gentleness. “Do not,” the apostle says, “anger your children”; in the corresponding place in Colossians, “Do not irritate your children, lest they be disheartened” (ch. iii. 21). In these parallel texts two distinct verbs are rendered by the one English word “provoke.” The Colossian passage warns against the chafing effect of parental exactions and fretfulness, that tend to break the child’s spirit and spoil its temper. Our text warns the father against angering his child by unfair or oppressive treatment. From this verb comes the noun “wrath” (or “provocation”) used in chapter iv. 26, denoting that stirring of anger which gives peculiar occasion to the devil.
Not that the father is forbidden to cross his child’s wishes, or to do anything or refuse anything that may excite its anger. Nothing is worse for a child than to find that parents fear its displeasure, and that it will gain its ends by passion. But the father must not be exasperating, must not needlessly thwart the child’s inclinations and excite in order to subdue its anger, as some will do even of set purpose, thinking that in this way obedience is learnt. This policy may secure submission; but it is gained at the cost of a rankling sense of injustice.
Household rule should be equally firm and kind, neither provoking nor avoiding the displeasure of its subjects, inflicting no severity for severity’s sake, but shrinking from none that fidelity demands. With much parental fondness, there is sometimes in family government a want of seriousness and steady principle, an absence in father or mother of the sense that they are dealing with moral and responsible beings in their little ones, and not with toys, which is reflected in the caprice and self-indulgence of the children’s maturer life. Such parents will give account hereafter of their stewardship with an inconsolable grief.
It is almost superfluous to insist on the apostle’s exhortation to treat children kindly. For them these are days of Paradise, compared with times not far distant. Never were the wants and the fancies of these small mortals catered for as they are now. In some households the danger lies at the opposite extreme from that of over-strictness. The children are idolized. Not their comfort and welfare only, but their humours and caprices become the law of the house. They are “nourished” indeed, but not “in the discipline and admonition of the Lord.” It is a great unkindness to treat our children so that they shall be strangers to hardship and restriction, so that they shall not know what real obedience means, and have no reverence for age, no habits of deference and self-denial. It is the way to breed monsters of selfishness, pampered creatures who will be useless and miserable in adult life.
“Discipline and admonition” are distinguished as positive and negative terms. The first is the “training up of the child in the way that he should go”; the second checks and holds him back from the ways in which he should not go. The former word (paideia)—denoting primarily treating-as-a-boy—signifies very often “chastisement”;[149] but it has a wider sense, embracing instruction besides.[150] It includes the whole course of training by which the boy is reared into a man.—Admonition is a still more familiar word with St Paul.[151] It may be reproof bearing upon errors in the past; or it may be warning, that points out dangers lying in the future. Both these services parents owe to their children. Admonition implies faults in the nature of the child, and wisdom in the father to see and correct them.