By E. A. WASHBURN, D.D.
“Honor thy father and thy mother; that thy days may
be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth
thee.”—Exod. xx: 12.
We open this second division of the Law with the duties of man to man;
and at its head stands the commandment of the household. I must repeat
here the remark of eminent scholars, that each of the original tables
probably contained five statutes; and thus the maxim we now consider
was directly joined with the four concerning the worship of God. Such
a view gives us indeed a new insight into the Hebrew religion, which
linked the first of social truths with a divine faith; it is the
anticipation of his Gospel, who has taught us that the love of parent
and children is the type of our holier bond in the family of Christ.
But there is a yet further thought in the words of this “commandment
with promise.” That “thy days maybe long in the land.” Those earlier
commandments tower above us like the lonely heights, where Moses
communed with God; but as we read this sentence, we see rise on the
eyes of the lawgiver the landscape of far Judea, with its laughing
fields, the voice of children and the home of calm old age. These
words suggest the whole line of our reasoning on this subject. Filial
reverence is the fountain of all affections, all duties; it flows like
the river of Eden, parted into its branching heads, through every
channel of human life.
It is then the family, as the institution which God has implanted in
our nature, and Christianity has hallowed, that we are to consider. I
know indeed no richer study than thus to trace its growth. I have no
theories to offer you. It is the simplest of facts. There has been no
more favorite field for our philosophers than that of the origin of
human government. Some have fancied that men met together in formal
compact; others have held the state of nature that of a pack of wolves,
at last brought together by self-interest to choose some kingly wolf,
who could keep the peace; and we have to-day our sages, so enamored
of their researches into comparative anatomy, that they can pass by
all the nobler facts of social history, and find the primitive man in
some anthropoid ape. Yet as the grandest laws of God are revealed in
the nearest example, we learn more than volumes of such theory in the
life of our own households. Government began with the family. It is
no artificial thing. It was not imposed by force. There is no state
of nature that goes before it; but as all our discoveries in organic
life lead to the primary cell, so all social formations are only the
enlargement of this little human embryo. We need no other truth than
that he, who gave us this moral being, made us to dwell in mutual
dependence; and thus the germ of all authority lies in the relation
of parent and child, in the care it calls forth, in the weakness
of infancy, and the natural reverence that springs from the heart.
Open the Book of the Genesis; you see the patriarch Abraham dwelling
in the tent with his children; you see this household passing into
tribes, linked in a bond of brotherhood, reverencing the father of
them all, who is priest and head; and you trace further on a Mosaic
commonwealth. History repeats the same early chapter in the Arab of
the desert to-day, or in the beginnings of ancient Rome. “Society in
primitive times,” it is said by one of the wisest of English jurists,
in his work on Ancient Law, “was not a collection of individuals; it
was an aggregation of families.” Among all early peoples the law of
the household is thus supreme; it embraces all duties, and reaches to
the nicest detail of courtesy. The oldest laws of China are as rich
in their family wisdom as any in the world. Filial reverence was the
corner-stone of the state. I well remember with what surprise I saw
the son of a venerable Parsee, himself a man of fifty, wait behind
his father’s chair during a long interview; it was a vestige of the
stately manners of the East, strangely contrasting with our civilized
rudeness. But if we will find the finest examples in the past, we must
turn to those scenes in the Old Testament, where the aged patriarch
lays his hands on his eldest born in token of his birth-right, or the
twelve gather reverently about the bed of the dying Jacob to receive
his blessing. In this household life, interwoven with all their social
habits, the heart of the Hebrew was nursed; and in many a quiet home,
like that of Nazareth, there grew the blossoming graces of childhood,
that made this history so pure amidst all its decays.
But we must pass from this earlier view to the new life of
Christianity, if we would know its nobler influence. Many pure
affections and virtues grew without doubt in a heathen civilization.
But the family authority was almost a despotism; the father had power
of life and death over the child, and woman was little more than a
slave. The one great feature of all social progress, we are told by
the jurist already cited, has been the recognition of the rights of
the person, instead of absolute family dependence. Here it was that
the religion of the Gospel had its living power, and I ask you to
study this wonderful fact in its early history. As we look back on the
state of society at that time, we are struck everywhere with the decay
of those fair examples of chastity, of maternal virtue, of household
strength which bloomed in the old Roman commonwealth. Family life had
withered, because it had not in its ancient pagan form those elements
which could preserve its influence amidst the shameless sensuality
of the world. The public talk of the forum, the theater, the games,
the busy out-of-door existence, such as you see to-day in Southern
Europe, were everything; nor was there a purer tide flowing into the
great city, as from the country homes of England and America, to
cleanse and freshen it. Religion was a brilliant temple pageantry.
Thus, as in all pagan lands, you have the same striking facts; the
degradation of woman and the degradation of man with it. This it was
that the religion of Christ changed. It taught, as its first truth,
that God was our Father, and all men one brotherhood in Christ. What
a revelation was this beyond all that the pagan mind had known! The
paternal power was no longer a despotism to the believer; the father
knew that he had a Father in heaven, and that his child was no serf,
but the household tie was a type of the holier family of God. Read that
clear utterance of the household law in St. Paul: “Children, obey your
parents in the Lord; fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.” The
Gospel cherished above all else the family authority; yet it hallowed,
sweetened, enlarged it. It nursed the virtues of the household. It
made woman the companion of the heart and home; it hallowed marriage;
it taught the love of Christ and the brethren, contentment, industry,
frugality, sacrifice, and charity to the poor. What picture so fair as
in the letters of that time of its fresh, healthful life; that “church
in the house,” breathing the soul of the early religion? The kingdom
came without observation, without noise; and a new home-born, home-bred
society grew in the midst of the dying civilization.
[_April 8._]