_For this is right_, says the apostle, appealing to the instincts of natural religion. The child's conscience begins here. Filial obedience is the primary form of duty. The loyalties of after life take their colour from the lessons learnt at home, in the time of dawning reason and incipient will. Hard indeed is the evil to remove, where in the plastic years of childhood obedience has been associated with base fear, with distrust or deceit, where it has grown sullen or obsequious in habit. From this root of bitterness there spring rank growths of hatred toward authority, jealousies, treacheries, and stubbornness. Obedience rendered "in the Lord" will be frank and willing, careful and constant, such as that which Jesus rendered to the Father.
St Paul reminds the children of the law of the Ten Words, taught to them in their earliest lessons from Scripture. He calls the command in question "_a first_ [or _chief_] commandment"--just as the great rule, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God," is _the_ first commandment; for this is no secondary rule or minor precept, but one on which the continuance of the Church and the welfare of society depend. It is a law fundamental as birth itself, written not on the statute-book alone but on the tables of the heart.
Moreover, it is a "command _in promise_"--that takes the form of promise, and holds out to obedience a bright future. The two predicates--"first" and "in promise"--as we take it, are distinct. To merge them into one blunts their meaning. This commandment is primary in its importance, and promissory in its import. The promise is quoted from Exodus xx. 12, as it stands in the Septuagint, where the Greek Christian children would read it. But the last clause is abbreviated; St Paul writes "upon _the earth_" in place of "the good land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." This blessing is the heritage of dutiful children in every land. Those who have watched the history of godly families of their acquaintance, will have seen the promise verified. The obedience of childhood and youth rendered to a wise Christian rule, forms in the young nature the habits of self-control and self-respect, of diligence and promptitude and faithfulness and kindliness of heart, which are the best guarantees for happiness and success in life. Through parental nurture "godliness" secures its "promise of the life that now is."
Children are exhorted to submission: fathers to _gentleness_. "Do not," the apostle says, "anger your children"; in the corresponding place in Colossians, "Do not irritate your children, lest they be disheartened" (ch. iii. 21). In these parallel texts two distinct verbs are rendered by the one English word "provoke." The Colossian passage warns against the chafing effect of parental exactions and fretfulness, that tend to break the child's spirit and spoil its temper. Our text warns the father against angering his child by unfair or oppressive treatment. From this verb comes the noun "wrath" (or "provocation") used in chapter iv. 26, denoting that stirring of anger which gives peculiar occasion to the devil.
Not that the father is forbidden to cross his child's wishes, or to do anything or refuse anything that may excite its anger. Nothing is worse for a child than to find that parents fear its displeasure, and that it will gain its ends by passion. But the father must not be exasperating, must not needlessly thwart the child's inclinations and excite in order to subdue its anger, as some will do even of set purpose, thinking that in this way obedience is learnt. This policy may secure submission; but it is gained at the cost of a rankling sense of injustice.
Household rule should be equally firm and kind, neither provoking nor avoiding the displeasure of its subjects, inflicting no severity for severity's sake, but shrinking from none that fidelity demands. With much parental fondness, there is sometimes in family government a want of seriousness and steady principle, an absence in father or mother of the sense that they are dealing with moral and responsible beings in their little ones, and not with toys, which is reflected in the caprice and self-indulgence of the children's maturer life. Such parents will give account hereafter of their stewardship with an inconsolable grief.