Obedience Based on Right.
PARENTS who wish to be cheerfully obeyed by their children, must themselves obey the laws which they seek to enforce. Louis XIV. wrote to his grandson, “If you wish to have your will habitually respected, you must show that you yourself are a slave to it.” Interpreting this counsel as meaning that a ruler must be nothing more than the application of a law to his subjects which he recognizes as the rule of his own life, it contains the secret of all successful authority in civil society, or in the home. Law, not arbitrary will—the will of God, not the caprices of passion—must be the manifest rule of family life. The thing required of the child must be required not merely because the parent wills it, but because it is right—because God wills it. When this is made obvious, even to willful children, and is calmly enforced as growing out of principles which the parent himself accepts as the rule of his own life, it compels respect, and, since it appeals directly to the conscience, it compels a responsive “I ought,” and often produces a resultant obedience.—Zion’s Herald.