Entry 51

Honour thy father and thy mother—All revealed religion reposes on the four first commandments of the Decalogue, and in like manner all our best domestic, social, and political life has its earliest, deepest, and most fruitful roots in the fifth commandment. Natural conscience, indeed, supplies to all men some knowledge of God, and sanctions a certain worship toward Him, and in like manner nature herself teaches every child to love and honour his parents. But just as the natural conscience requires to be corrected, guided, and reinforced by revelation, so the filial instinct must be watched over, its growth promoted, and its fruits secured.

Of all the commandments in the Decalogue, perhaps none was so well observed in the house of Israel as the commandment to honour father and mother. Of all the beautiful and winning pictures of patriarchal life that have been handed down to us, there are none so uniformly sweet and beautiful as those of parental love and solicitude on the one hand, and those of filial love and honour on the other. The union between parent and child was both by divine law and universal custom much closer and much more lasting than in our day would be either desirable or possible. But apart from the local, primitive, and temporary forms which this natural relation and divine precept took in the patriarchal communities, the parental care and love, and the corresponding filial reverence and obedience in the house of Israel are set before us as ensamples worthy of all admiration and imitation.

The honouring of our parents comes in the order of the commandments after the honouring and worship of God; but in the order of nature, and in our actual lives, the fifth commandment is the first fulfilled. A child’s father is more than a father to him; his father is both his father and his god. A little child cannot rise above his father. It is impiety to him to think that there can be anywhere any one greater or better than his own greatest and best of fathers. To every child his father is the man of men. There is nothing he cannot do. There is no valour, no nobleness, no resources, no wisdom with which he is not clothed. The pious heart that will afterwards rise to everlasting adoration and love of its Father in heaven, for a long time knows Him not, and feels no need of Him. What child cares for more than just to have his father ever near him to love and worship? And in all this, “earthly fathers learn their craft from God.” For God for a time clothes every father among us with His own attributes, and prerogatives, and dues. The divine throne, the divine sceptre, the divine sword, are immediately made over to the house of every man into whose keeping and care a little child is committed.

The honour due to parents, and to all superiors set over us in the Lord, is thus expanded and explained in the Larger Catechism, that incomparable commentary on the Shorter: “This honour consists in all due reverence in heart, word, and behaviour; prayer and thanksgiving for them; imitation of their virtues and graces: willing obedience to their lawful commands and counsels; due submission to their corrections; fidelity to, defence, and maintenance of their persons and authority; bearing with their infirmities, and covering them in love,” and such like. Honour, indeed, is a noble, rich, and inexhaustible word. Honour is more than love, and it is more than fear; for it is both love and fear. There may be a love where there is neither esteem nor reverence, and there may be a fear where there is no affection; but he who has true honour in his heart toward any one, has toward him both love and fear. The highest and noblest love always contains an element of fear. No one truly loves another who does not feel reverence toward him. And this is the love that is due from a child to his parents; love with fear; honour, which contains both love and fear. A child without this honour is worse than no child at all. Such a child, says Calvin, is a monster, and not a man.

“Children, obey your parents in the Lord,” adds Paul; that is to say, obey and honour your parents as Christian children should; as the child Jesus did, and as He commands. With all Old Testament commands and counsels and examples, exalted and spiritualized as the New Testament exalts and spiritualizes all Old Testament duties and commands.

that thy days may be long upon the land—“The Lord spoke to the Israelites specially of the land which He had promised them for an inheritance. But as the whole earth is blessed to believers, we justly class the present life among the number of divine blessings. It is not promised to us, nor was it promised to the Jews, as if in itself it constituted happiness, but because it is an ordinary symbol of the divine favour to the Jews. Wherefore, if any one who is obedient to parents happens to be cut off before mature age (a thing which not unfrequently happens), the Lord nevertheless adheres to His promise as steadily as when He bestows a hundred acres of land when He had promised only one” (Calvin).

“In my Father’s house are many mansions; . . . I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.”

“We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.”—Festus.

as far as it shall serve for God’s glory and their own good—“It is a received rule among divines, that all temporal promises are to be understood cum exceptione crucis; that is to say, not absolutely, but with this reservation, unless the Lord in His holy wisdom shall see it good for us to have it otherwise” (Sanderson).

Uses

The graces with which we are clothed in our childhood will remain with us to be our ornament and defence in manhood, and amid its manifold relationships. To honour our father and mother is the first step toward honouring all men and adoring and serving God. Our Lord is but recognizing this original law of our nature, when He says that we must become little children again if we would enter His Father’s house. That is to say, we must become simple, reverent, devout, obedient, as we were long ago when we were little children.
Every well-organized, well-ruled household is a very seminary of good morals and good manners to society, as well as a pillar of stability to the State. All the virtues thrive in a family where the children are ruled by a pious, loving, conscientious hand. Every son who has been brought up in that nurture and admonition which produces honour, respect, and obedience, is a gift to society and the State of a priceless kind.
In the Memoirs of Jonathan Edwards we read largely of his wise and saintly wife, and of her success in the upbringing of her children. As thus: “She had need to speak but once, and she was cheerfully obeyed; murmuring and answering again were not known among her children. In their manners they were uncommonly respectful to their parents. When their parents came into the room, they all instinctively rose from their seats, and never resumed them till their parents were seated; and when either parent was speaking, no matter with whom they had been conversing, they were all immediately silent and attentive.” The whole Memoir is too little read.
“A man shall see, where there is a house full of children, one or two of the eldest respected, and the youngest made wantons. But in the middest, some there are, as it were forgotten, who, many times, neverthelesse, prove the best” (Bacon, Of Parents and Children).
“The justice of God falls more severely on those who degenerate from a holy parent than on those who have no incitement to good from the piety of their homes.”
“Distaste will vitiate our observance of the fifth commandment. . . . Our elders speak and we wish they would be quiet; their manners are old-fashioned, their taste is barbarous. Their opinions are obsolete, their standard is childish, they know nothing available, they do not even aim at knowing any person or any thing worth knowing. We habitually stand in an attitude of endurance or of self-defence: we are censors and not children, at best we tolerate what we cannot reform. Bystanders may see ever so clearly that our father’s little finger outweighs our whole self, but we see nothing of the sort. . . . Nor is our own day exempt from even an exceptional temptation to this sin of distaste; for now it is common enough in some ranks for children to be better taught than their parents, and those who acquire that dangerous thing, a little learning, are more likely to be puffed up by the little they know than ballasted by the much they know not; conceit spurns at reverence and submission, and the undermining of natural piety is too often followed by the repudiation of spiritual loyalty” (Christina Rossetti).

Questions

It is not in the power of parents to traduce holiness to their children; it is the blessing of God that feoffs them in the virtues of their parents, as they feoff themselves in their sins (Joseph Hall). Derive and explain traduce and feoff.
Read the account Christian gives to Charity of his carriage as a husband and father before he set out on pilgrimage.
Explain Pearson’s words: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord,” is an evangelical precept, but founded upon principles of reason and justice.
Who first uttered these now familiar words: How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!
Commit Dr. Horatius Bonar’s lines on a long life:—

He liveth long who liveth well!
All other life is short and vain;
He liveth longest who can tell
Of living most for heavenly gain.

He liveth long who liveth well!
All else is being flung away;
He liveth longest who can tell
Of true things truly done each day.