"When brothers will not come to an agreement before the sentence of the judge, public morals have already deteriorated. If father and son go before the mandarin that he may decide between them, the state is in danger. If children plot against the life of their parents, and brothers against that of each other, all is lost."
This tender reverence for parents instils into the Chinese a similar regard for aged persons, for authorities, and for national customs. Their empire has been in existence for almost four thousand years!
The contrary disposition, which denies to old age its becoming deference, which impels youth to contemn the experience of the past, and to wish, in its immaturity of judgment, to pass sentence upon all subjects, destroys social relations and undermines and ultimately ruins empires. It robs youth of its true grace; destroys the modesty and thirst for knowledge of the young man as well as the blushing diffidence of the maiden; defrauds age of its dignity; renders customs and laws altogether powerless.
Quid leges, sine moribus
Vanae, proficiunt.
said Horace.
The young man trifles with the gaudy display of ever-changing fashion, a pest of our country from which the more serious east never languished. His philosophy is of the fashion as well as his clothes; and though, at present, he considers them as the very best, he is nevertheless ready to change them both and decry them as unsuitable, reserving the liberty, however, of resuming them as soon as the wand of the enchantress Fashion will have given the sign.
The religion of Jesus Christ confers a pure dignity upon the worthiest and most tender relations of nature. It teaches us to revere a father in the Being of all beings, to love him tenderly whose eternal Son did not disdain to become our brother, to become the Spouse of his church. It sanctifies every relation of nature, every relation of society. But in attempting to picture to ourselves a state of the world in which the great majority would be doing homage to the religion of Jesus Christ, not merely in words, but in spirit and in deed, a feeling of sadness takes possession of the soul like to that which might come upon a prisoner, highly gifted with musical genius, while reading with the eye the harmonies of Handel and Gluck, when his ear was denied the rapture of hearing their enchanting melodies.