XX.
THE OBEDIENCE OF CHILDREN.
There is much misapprehension as to the true nature of obedience. Wherein does obedience really consist? What is its essence?
Merely doing a specified act, which has been required, is not necessarily an act of obedience. A father may have a rule of his household that the children shall rise in the morning at five o'clock. A son who habitually disregards this rule, may rise at the appointed time on a particular morning, in order to join a companion on a fishing excursion, or for some object connected solely with his own pleasure and convenience. Here the external act is the one required. He rises at the hour enjoined by his father's command. But his doing so has no reference to his father's wishes. It is not in any sense an act of obedience. Something more than mere external compliance with a rule or a command is needed to constitute obedience. In other words, not only the act itself must be the one required, but the motive must be right.
If I am led to do what my father or my mother requires, by mere dint of coaxing, or by the expectation of cakes or pennies or promised indulgence of any kind, if it is a bargain, in which I give so much compliance for so much per contra of self-gratification, the compliance rendered is not an act of obedience. As well might a man profess to obey his neighbor, because he gives him a bag of oats for a bag of corn. A great deal of what passes for obedience in families and schools, is mere barter. Strip the matter of all glosses and disguises, and the naked truth remains, that children are hired to do what the parent or the teacher wants to have done. They do not obey, in any legitimate and wholesome use of the word. They are quiet when they should be quiet, they learn the lessons which they should learn, they abstain from whatever things they should abstain from, because they have learned that this is the only way to gain the indulgences which they desire. The parent and the teacher use a motive adequate to secure the outward act, but they do not secure obedience.
It is not obedience for a child to do a thing because his reason and conscience tell him that the act in itself, without reference to his parents' wishes, is right and proper. At least it is not filial obedience. I may be obeying my conscience, but I am not obeying my father. Many parents, who are above the weakness of bribing their children, satisfy themselves by reasoning with them. Far be it from us to say a word against any legitimate appeal to the reason and conscience of a child. Children, at the proper age, should be taught to reason and to judge for themselves, in regard to the right and wrong of actions, just as they should learn to walk alone, and not be forever dependent upon leading strings. Only, let it be understood that just so far as the child acts on its own independent judgment, the act is not one of filial obedience.
Obedience is doing a thing because another, having competent authority, has enjoined it. The motive necessary to constitute any act an act of obedience, is a reference to the will and authority of another. It is submission of our will to the will of another. The child receives as true what his parents say, and because they say it; so, he does as right what they command, and because they command it. That fact is, and in the first instance it should be, to the child's mind, the ultimate and sufficient reason for either believing or doing—for faith or obedience. This faith and obedience rendered to my earthly father, which is only partial and temporary, besides serving its own immediate ends, in securing a well-ordered household and my own best interests as a child, has the further end of training me for that unqualified faith and obedience, which I am to render to my heavenly Father, and which is of universal and permanent obligation. One object of the parental relation seems to be to fit the soul for this higher obedience. I must, however, learn to obey my father simply because he is my father, and because as such he has the right to command me, if thereby I am to learn, for a like reason, to obey my heavenly Father. No lower motive will secure the end.
Submission to parental authority is not always the instinctive impulse of childhood. Where this submission is not yielded, it must be enforced. Authority, in other words, requires sanctions. The father has no right to command, unless he has the right to punish in case of disobedience. Furthermore, if he does not, especially in the early childhood of his offspring, train them to a habit of real obedience and submission to authority, he does his children a great wrong. He deprives them of the benefit of that habit of obedience, which will be of the utmost value to them in their future religious life.
A man forbids his child to eat green apples. The child abstains. That abstinence is not necessarily an act of obedience.
He may abstain because his mother offers, in case of his doing so, to give him sugar-plums, and he prefers the sugar-plums to the apples. This is not obedience.
Or, his reason and experience may have taught him that the eating of green fruit will cause him sickness and pain, and so he abstains for the same reasons that his father, mother, or anybody else does. This is not obedience.