IS IT AN OBSOLETE LAW?
By Editor
ONE wonders sometimes if the fifth commandment has been repealed for the benefit of young America. There seems to be a general understanding that in place of an age of obedient children we are living in an age of obedient parents. A remark of Mrs. Fuller, wife of the Justice of the Supreme Court, whose daughter lately saw fit to disregard her parents’ wishes by making a runaway match, is quite significant: “Mr. Fuller and I agree that we are nineteenth-century people, and can do nothing.” The nineteenth century has accomplished many wonders, but it has not been able as yet to dispense with parents altogether. They still have their use, and their right is still conceded to maintain their children. Here their rights, in many cases, seem to end. What is to be done about it? The evil cries for a remedy, and that right speedily. The fault is not altogether with the young. Parents must be blamed for not training their children to habits of respectful speech and obedient manner. This is too often neglected nowadays. There needs to be a more wholesome respect for Solomon’s wise saying: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son; but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” We do not take this to be an injunction to corporal punishment alone, though it includes that, but to discipline of every kind by which the habit of respectful obedience is taught the young. The use of the literal rod may sometimes be necessary, though it has too often been abused, and the parent who cannot rule his child without habitual reliance on physical chastisement is unfit to govern anybody. But that the young should be disciplined, that habits of obedience and respect for their elders should be early formed in them, is as much the teaching of common sense as it is of Scripture. Such training is systematically neglected in many (we had nearly written most) American households. Almost everything may be accomplished by early training, and if the youth of America no longer render due obedience to their parents, the defect must be due to defective training more than to any one cause. We do not plead for the exaggerated respect that was once exacted from children, nor for the sternness with which their natural impulses were formerly repressed, and still less for the severity with which it was once the rule to punish even slight infractions of the domestic laws. There is reason in all things. It is not necessary to be either too stern or too indulgent; we are not compelled to choose between brutal punishments and the disuse of all discipline. A golden mean is both possible and desirable, a mean marked by affectionate firmness, by indulgence of all harmless impulses, by encouragement of innocent joy, but also by repression of evil propensities, and by punishments at once certain and mild in every case of serious lapse from the strait way of obedience.—Examiner (Baptist).