Punishment of Parental Sins.
By T. L. Cuyler
By a striking concurrence we have two domestic histories unfolded side by side in the Bible. One is the story of wise parental training, as illustrated in the case of Elkanah and Hannah, the father and mother of Samuel. The other is the tragic story of Eli, the father of those two "scapegraces," Hophni and Phineas. This latter story is a beacon of warning against parental indulgence of sins committed by those who are intrusted to us as the trustees of their spiritual welfare. It depicts the errors and the doom of a father who fell a victim to the sins of his children, which became really his own sins by his failure to hinder them at the right time and in the right manner. Among all the Bible narratives, none is more instructive than the short, sad biography of gray-haired Eli. Eli exhibited a wonderfully beautiful submissiveness to the will of God under a most humiliating trial. When Samuel had told him every whit of the just judgments that were impending over him, he uttered those brave words of resignation: "It is the Lord; let him do what seemeth him good." We do not exaggerate when we affirm that, if looked at only on the bright side of his character, Eli would be one of the most admirable men in the Old Testament picture gallery. But the attractions of the bright side only deepen the darkness of the dark side. The clay in Eli's composition was exceedingly frail and friable. Excellent as were his convictions of duty, he seems to have been pitifully weak in working them into practice. There was a lamentable lack of will-power. When warned of his weaknesses and of the calamities that would follow them, he did not grasp hold of duty with a resolute hand and carry it through with promptness and thoroughness. This feeble irresolution and pulpiness of character brought fearful miseries upon himself and wrought fearful mischief to others. There are too many such people now-a-days—men and women of good impulses, but of weak performance. They lack spiritual force and fiber; when the strain comes, they snap. When we hear them pray so penitently over their own frailties, we do not deny their sincerity; yet as soon as they are done sorrowing, they begin to sin again in the same direction. The one vital point in which high priest Eli broke down most disgracefully was in the management of his own household. This has given him his unhappy celebrity; his very name is proverbial for parental neglect, and for the penalty which such neglect commonly brings. Eli's misgovernment of his children had two cardinal faults. One error was that he rebuked his sons too late. The other error of the weak-backed Eli was that, having postponed his correction of his dissolute sons until they became hardened in vice, his words of rebuke were as weak as water. As quaint old Matthew Henry remarks, "There was no edge to his reproofs." He was not only too late; he was too lenient. Eli's wretched failure was the failure of millions of fathers since his day; when his children were young he would not restrain them, and when they grew older, he could not. With a few timid words he vainly strove to subdue the stalwart transgressors whom he had allowed to wax strong and stubborn in their sins, which had become so rank as to "smell to Heaven." It was a mournful proof of the old man's utter and pitiable loss of all power of restraint, that the reckless sons would not even "hearken to the voice of their father." The grace of God is not transmitted by inheritance, yet a father's conscientious piety is often reproduced in his children. If his footprints are deeply indented toward God and Heaven, he may reasonably hope that his children will tread in them. "He sought to the Lord God of his father, and walked in his commandments," is the Bible description of the good King Jehoshaphat. If there is a law of Christian nurture by which, with God's help, the godly family becomes a nursery of religion, so there is a law of unchristian nurture, and by this law bad opinions and bad habits are transmitted to the next generation. Whatever "fires the father kindles, the children gather the wood." If the father sets a decanter on his table, the boys soon practice at the glass; a large percentage of all our drunkenness is hereditary. Pulpit invitations and warnings, however faithful, are drowned amid the din of an irregular home. Show me a father who talks nothing but money at his own table, and I will show you a crop of boys whose chief ambition is to be rich; show me one who talks horses and games, and I will promise you a fast-driving troop of young sportsmen. Show me one who fences his home around with God's commandments, and lights it up with domestic comforts and pleasures, and anchors himself to his home, and I will show you the best kind of restraint from dangerous evening resorts. A happy Christian home is the surest antidote for evil amusements. But if a father hears the clock strike eleven in the theater or in his clubhouse, he need not be surprised if his sons hear it strike twelve in the drinking-saloon or the gaming-room or the haunts of the profligate. Even in spite of the strongest restraints, some sons will break through into sin; but if a parent leads into irreligion, what but God's omnipotent grace can keep his imitative household from following him to perdition? The history of such a family is commonly written in that frequent line found in the Old Testament: "He walked in all the sins of his father, which he had done before him." But Eli, you may say, was a servant of God. So he was, in his way, but there are two very different types of paternal religion. One parent prays at his family altar for the conversion of his children, and then does his utmost to secure what he prays for. He surrounds his home with Bible restraints against sinful temptations. He aims to make both his religion and his home attractive. The books he purchases, the journals he takes, the amusements he provides, the company he invites, the whole atmosphere of his home, are made to be a restraint against evil by being an attraction toward purity and true religion. The Holy Spirit is not invoked to convert his offspring to Christ while the head of the house is perverting them to worldliness, or self-seeking, or frivolity, or secret contempt for all religion. Yet I fear that certain fathers are guilty of Eli's folly and fatal blunder. They busy themselves with certain words and acts of religious observance; they try to serve God in certain directions; they even pray, formally, for their children's conversion. But their daily example, their conduct, and the whole trend of their influence are not an effective restraint against sin; they do not draw their children toward Jesus Christ and his commandments as the law of life. It is a terrible truth to declare, but I honestly believe that some professed Christians are an absolute hindrance to the conversion of their children. For the warning of such the divine Spirit has spread out at full length the calamitous history of Eli's awful mistake. Being dead, Eli yet speaketh. He speaks to-day, and warns us who are parents that if we commit his sin, our sin will yet find us out. Methinks that from his lips, growing pale in death, we can catch the faltering words, "A foolish son is a grief to his father and a bitterness to her that bare him. Correct thy sons, and they shall give thee rest, yea, delight unto thy soul. But a child left to himself bringeth his father and mother to shame."—T. L. Cuyler.