It is almost superfluous to insist on the apostle's exhortation to treat children kindly. For them these are days of Paradise, compared with times not far distant. Never were the wants and the fancies of these small mortals catered for as they are now. In some households the danger lies at the opposite extreme from that of over-strictness. The children are idolized. Not their comfort and welfare only, but their humours and caprices become the law of the house. They are "nourished" indeed, but not "in the discipline and admonition of the Lord." It is a great unkindness to treat our children so that they shall be strangers to hardship and restriction, so that they shall not know what real obedience means, and have no reverence for age, no habits of deference and self-denial. It is the way to breed monsters of selfishness, pampered creatures who will be useless and miserable in adult life.
"Discipline and admonition" are distinguished as positive and negative terms. The first is the "training up of the child in the way that he should go"; the second checks and holds him back from the ways in which he should not go. The former word (_paideia_)--denoting primarily _treating-as-a-boy_--signifies very often "chastisement";[149] but it has a wider sense, embracing instruction besides.[150] It includes the whole course of training by which the boy is reared into a man.--_Admonition_ is a still more familiar word with St Paul.[151] It may be reproof bearing upon errors in the past; or it may be warning, that points out dangers lying in the future. Both these services parents owe to their children. Admonition implies faults in the nature of the child, and wisdom in the father to see and correct them.
"Foolishness," says the Hebrew proverb, "is bound up in the heart of a child." In the Old Testament discipline there was something over-stern. The "hardness of heart" censured by the Lord Jesus, which allowed of two mothers in the house, put barriers between the father and his offspring that rendered "the rod of correction" more needful than it is under the rule of Christ. But correction, in gentler or severer sort, there must be, so long as children spring from sinful parents. The child's conscience responds to the kindly and searching word of reproof, to the admonition of love. This faithful dealing with his children wins for the father in the end a deep gratitude, and makes his memory a guard in days of temptation and an object of tender reverence.
The child's "obedience _in the Lord_" is its response to "the discipline and admonition _of the Lord_" exercised by its parents. The discipline which wise Christian fathers give their children, is the Lord's discipline applied through them. "Correction and instruction should proceed from the Lord and be directed by the Spirit of the Lord, in such a way that it is not so much the father who corrects his children and teaches them, as the Lord through him" (Monod). Thus the Father of whom every family on earth is named, within each Christian house works all in all. Thus the chief Shepherd, through His under-shepherds, guides and feeds the lambs of His flock. By the gate of His fold fathers and mothers themselves have entered; and the little ones follow with them. In the pastures of His word they nourish them, and rule them with His rod and staff. To their offspring they become an image of the Good Shepherd and the Father in heaven. Their office teaches them more of God's fatherly ways with themselves. From their children's humbleness and confidence, from their simple wisdom, their hopes and fears and ignorances, the elders learn deep and affecting lessons concerning their own relations to the heavenly Father.
St Paul's instruction to fathers applies to all who have the charge of children: to schoolmasters of every degree, whose work, secular as it may be called, touches the springs of moral life and character; to teachers in the Sunday school, successors to the work that Christ assigned to Peter, of shepherding His lambs. These instructors supply the Lord's nurture to multitudes of children, in whose homes Christian faith and example are wanting. The ideas which children form of Christ and His religion, are gathered from what they see and hear in the school. Many a child receives its bias for life from the influence of the teacher before whom it sits on Sunday. The love and meekness of wisdom, or the coldness or carelessness of the one who thus stands between Christ and the infant soul, will make or mar its spiritual future.