"Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."
While obedience to parents is the primary significance of this command, its widening scope is seen in the comprehensive authority of the father of the old Hebrew family. He was the ruler and the protector of the family, and as human society enlarged and much of the original authority of the parent passed from him, the child was prepared to give honor to such authority and wisdom as he had recognized in the father. Thus generically the command may cover the wide range suggested by the Westminster Assembly: "The Fifth Commandment requireth the preserving the honor and performing the duties belonging to every one in their several places and relations as superiors, inferiors or equals." And this honor idea in the home not only spreads out, but it climbs, and we may say that as the Hebrew family contained the beginning of government, all other authorities of this world wind up and out of the home, ascending in spiral form until the little coil of the domestic circle eventuates.
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Last summer, while seated in a crowded train, my attention was attracted by a little family group. The heat-worn mother held a baby in one arm, and the other hand was steadying a toddling boy. She had repeatedly reproved her half-grown daughter and finally spoke sharply to her, when the child suddenly lifted the heavy umbrella in her hand and struck her mother!
These are the facts that impressed me: the unmasked powerlessness of the mother, the cool unconcern of the father, but above all the apathetic indifference of the passengers.
The modern family is without discipline, all of the elements in the home having a tendency to wander from the hearth center. There is the father whose absence, because of occupational absorption, is lengthened by many extraneous interests. The mother, too, is receding from the home center in her misguided enthusiasm for so-called equality in business, professional, and political life. And the children? As one sad-faced mother said to me the other day, "They get out of the home so early!"
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All the reverence for parents in the world's history, is hallowed by the lofty example of Jesus in his dutiful subjection to his earthly parents, and in the marvelous solicitude of his dying words, "Son, behold thy mother!"
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A great light is thrown on this economic relation of the commandment by the attitude of the Centurion pleading with the Master for his servant's life. Here was an employer whose stretched-out arm of authority could be transformed into a gesture of appeal, for his servant lying sick at home. Indeed only as the spirit of this commandment makes itself felt in our business life will the clenched hands of capital and labor relax from the hilts of their dripping blades and grasp each other with the warm pressure of brotherly sympathy.