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.

But children often have not the forethought to look at remote consequences, or they have not the strength of purpose to deny a present gratification for the sake of a distant good, and especially for a good of which they have only a vague idea through the representations of their parents or teachers. Suppose such a case. Suppose a child with a strong inclination and desire for the thing forbidden, and with no clear apprehension that there is anything wrong or hurtful in the indulgence, except in the fact that the father has forbidden it, and with no temptation of a higher indulgence as a reward for abstaining. If, in such a case, the child abstains, he performs a true act of obedience. He really subjects his will to the will of his father.

This kind of implicit obedience is greatly needed. It is to be secured just as our heavenly Father secures obedience to some of his laws. If a child thrusts his finger into the candle, he violates a law, and he instantly suffers for it. We are surrounded by many such laws, without the observance of which we could not live a day. To teach us obedience to these laws, the penalty of transgression is immediate and sharp. There are other laws of our physical well-being, the penalties of which are remote, and in regard to those we have room for the exercise and cultivation of our reasoning powers. Now in childhood, there are many things which a child should be taught to forbear doing as promptly as he forbears to thrust his hand into the fire. Yet for these things there is no natural penalty. Here the command of the parent should be interposed, and transgression should be promptly followed by penalty. The authority of the parent and the penalties by which he sustains it, guide the child during those years when reason and the power of self-denial are weak. But to make this discipline easy and effective, there should be no hesitation or uncertainty about the exercise of it. Parents often have to strain their authority, and use very largely their right of punishment, because they are so unequal and irregular in their methods of government. A child soon ceases to thrust his finger into the fire. Fire is not a thing which burns one day, and may be safely tampered with the next. So, if disobedience, invariably and promptly, without passion or caprice, and with the uniformity of a law of nature, brings such a penalty as to make the disobedience painful, there will be little transgression and little need of punishment. A child does not fret because he cannot play with fire. He will not fret because he cannot transgress a father's direct command, if he once knows that such commands _must_ be obeyed.