Chap. I.]
THE DOMESTIC RELATIONS.
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affection, respect, and reverence. They are to remember andregard their parents as standing in the most venerable, and themost endearing of all earthly relations to them ; as those towhom, under God, they owe every thing they are, and everything they hope to be. They are to regard them as the personsto whose kindness, care, and government, they have been com-mitted by God himself. They are to consider them as themost affectionate, the most faithful, the most confidential, themost persevering, the most watchful, and the most disinterestedof friends.*
Again, children, during their early years, are to render theirparents a prompt and cheerful obedience ; and, when they cometo years of discretion, and indeed, at every period of life, tomanifest a marked respect for their persons, regard for their ad-vice, and deference to their wishes. Disobedience to parents isranked by St. Paul with envy, malignity, deceit, and even withmurder and destitution of natural affection.f It is in the orderof nature for parents to command, and for children to obey.No conduct, perhaps, is more severely denounced in Scrip-ture, than disobedience and disrespect to parents. |
Moreover, children are to give their parents the solace andcomfort of their conversation and company, when, in the orderof nature, they are visited with the decay and manifold infirmitiesof declining years. Parents have watched over the helplessness,and borne with the infirmities of their children, when in their in-fancy ; and it is but the reciprocal duty of their children, to watchover the decline, and sustain the sinking spirits of their parents,when, as the wisest of men says, “ the evil days come, and theyears draw nigh in which they can have no pleasure in them.”§
Furthermore, children are sacredly bound in conscience tomeet, as far as possible, the expectations formed of them by theirparents, in after life ; by which alone they can make a full returnfor the care, the expense, and the anxieties which their nurturehas cost their parents. Writers of all ages, and of all countries,have taught us, with a united voice, that, in the eye of all man-
* Dwight’s Theology, Vol. IV. p. 87. t Romans i. 29-31.
t Deuteronomy xxi. 18-21; Proverbs xxx. 17. § Ecclesiastes xii. 1.
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