PARENTAL AUTHORITY

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 12, 1868

PARENTAL AUTHORITY.

It is painful to hear and read in religious papers so much of the whining, pleading, and entreating of mothers at the present day to influence their children to obey them. I recently read an article in a family newspaper, where a mother desired her little son to give her a promise to go to bed at a certain hour, she intending to spend the evening out. The boy would not make the promise, and she went away looking sad, and when she came back wept over him. Why did she not use the authority God had given her and enforce obedience, rather than put him on the throne, and herself take the attitude of a suppliant and entreat him to yield to her wishes, thus hardening his heart?

We read nothing of Abraham’s coaxing his children to do what he wished them to do, and then crying over them because they did not. “But I know him,” said God, “that he will command his children and his house after him, that they may keep the way of the Lord to do justice and judgment, that I may do unto Abraham all the good that I have promised.”

Those parents in this day, who substitute reasoning and coaxing for control and authority, seem to be imitators of Eli, who when his sons did wickedly “restrained them not,” but said, “Why do ye so, my sons?” Therefore was the curse of the Lord sent upon his house forever. “Thy two sons—in one day they shall die both of them,” said God, “and there shall not be an old man in thy house forever,” “because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not.”