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VIII.—OBEDIENCE

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 30, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 31.

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VIII.—OBEDIENCE

The word obedience, in the common thought, means subservience; but in reality it only implies the power of choice. If there is not power of choice there is certainly not obedience, but slavery.
If conduct results from compulsion, it is submission, not obedience. We talk much in these latter days of personal liberty, but the only free man is he who wisely chooses his master.
“Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.” This is the law of life—service, obedience. Our freedom is to choose what or whom we shall obey. With this thought firmly implanted in our minds, we begin to see that obedience is dignified; and we begin also to realize the great issues that underlie the question of training children to obey. We begin to see that we are working not for the moment but for time, for eternity; that the immediate result is the smallest part of the training. We say to the child, Do this, or do not do that, and think the great thing is that these commands should be promptly obeyed; when in fact the immediate thing is of small importance, while the ultimate result is of vital importance.
“You must not touch the stove,” we say to baby, and think we are working to save him from present pain. In truth our prohibition has the wider purpose of teaching him one phase of the great law of preservation which he must obey in order to avoid suffering. Perhaps he will not learn that law except by following the law of impulse, and finding out by experience that fire burns.
This law of impulse is one to which it is easy to yield obedience, and a large part of the child’s training is to teach him obedience to a higher law.
He takes a toy that belongs to a companion in obedience to a selfish impulse or desire for possession. We insist that he shall obey the righteous law of regard for the property rights of others, and give back the toy. We ask him to share his sweets with his friends, thus yielding obedience to the law of generosity instead of obeying the selfish impulse. We insist that he shall keep still because some one’s head aches, thus yielding obedience to the law of kindness instead of following the law of his nature which impels him to activity and noise. We require that he shall hold his spoon in his right hand and eat with it daintily, thus obeying custom rather than the instinctive inclination to eat with his fingers. Thus we see that in all the ways in which we require him to obey our commands, we are indicating that there is a possibility of obedience to some other law. To be obedient, then, only means that the individual has chosen to obey one thing rather than another. The disobedient child has chosen to follow his own inclinations or the suggestions of a companion rather than the law of the parent. The man who is said to have disobeyed the law of the land has in reality chosen to obey his own desires.
It being true then that disobedience means an unwise choice of masters, we see that obedience is the dignified course, meaning as it does, the voluntary yielding to rightful authority. The problem before the parent then is not simply to secure immediate submission to his will, but the arousing in the child the desire to choose wisely the authority which shall rule over him.
It is true that in his early childhood he must obey without being able to reason out the why of his obedience. He is acquiring his technique, as it were, just as he studies exercises in learning to play the piano. He first learns how to yield his will to that of another; and as judgment develops, he learns to choose, and so becomes the truly free man.
With his larger idea of the value and dignity of obedience, the parent begins with the baby in teaching him to obey the laws of nature for his own protection. He learns that fire burns flesh. That is its law; and obeying the law of his own body, he keeps away from fire. Later he learns other laws of fire, and, obeying these, secures warmth for his house and steam for his travel or manufactories.
If wise, he obeys the laws of his being in eating, exercise, and sleeping, or if unwise, he obeys inclination and eats unwisely and neglects sleep and exercise, and reaps the result of service to impulse rather than law.
As his mental and moral nature develop, he learns the laws of kindness, benevolence, justice, honesty, and either obeys them and is rewarded by freedom, or obeys selfish inclination and is fettered by evil habit, or the loss of bodily liberty.
Too often man, in childhood or maturity, feels that obedience is degradation, and that he is asserting his manhood in rebelling against the power that claims a rightful authority over him. If he could only realize that obedience to recognized authority is the only way in which he can prove his manliness, because it indicates his voluntary choice of that which rightfully should be his master, he must realize that what is called disobedience is in truth an acknowledgment that he obeys a lower power, and therefore is less noble.
The authority of the parent is not because of the tie of blood. The father’s right to require obedience is because he is under obligation to teach the child how to choose wisely his way of life. If he fails in this, he has failed in the vital point, even tho, through force or fear, he has secured the child’s obedience. The value of obedience is in its being voluntarily rendered, being of choice.
I once had in my house a child of five who had no idea of obeying except by compulsion. I learned that she had a great desire to be a lady, and I spent no little time in teaching her to say “thank you,” “excuse me,” and not to pass in front of people, telling her that was not the way ladies did. After some months of indifferent success, I was rewarded. One day she started to pass in front of me, then pausing said, “Now I am going back and make myself do that over.” The mother who saw the little incident laughed at it as funny. I said, “You think that amusing, but it is what I have been working for all this time, to arouse in the child a desire to do the thing required.”
To be sure, she might have learned through constant admonition not to be guilty of such rudeness, but it would not have been worthy of the name of obedience until it sprang from the impulse of her own heart, indicating that her nature was coming under the law of courtesy, and she was choosing to obey that law. Many words might be employed in illustrating this idea, but the thoughtful parent can follow out the suggestions here given, and for himself discover how he can help his child to become truly free and great by the wise choice of the master whom he will serve.