Chapter XII
Filial Love
The most important of the obligations by which human society is bound together, is the mutual duty of parents and children. This seems clearly implied in the place assigned in the Decalogue to the Commandment enjoining it. “Honour thy father and thy mother,” is the first Commandment on the second table of stone whereon was written the summary of our moral relations with the world in which we live. I do not mean, indeed, that any sin of filial disobedience, taken by itself, is as great as a sin of murder or as a sin against the sixth commandment. To prevent sins of the former kind—to make a child obedient, loving, respectful to its parents, is to go far in making it observe all its other duties to society. The criminal classes are not recruited from well-regulated homes; and the useful, law-abiding citizen is scarcely ever the outcome of a childhood that dishonoured parents, and brought sorrow on old age. In this sense, the fourth Commandment must be regarded as the most important and fundamental of all those that God has given us to guide and determine our relations with each other.
But why was not the fourth Commandment imposed primarily on parents—why did it not run thus: “Fathers and mothers, train up your children in My love and service?” Of course, we do not know what were the reasons for which God gave the Commandment in the form in which we have received it. But I think it is useful to seek for reasons, in all humility, as far as they may be discovered, in order that we obtain a clearer insight into the nature and importance of the Commandment itself. It would seem then, that it was given in its present form, first, to assert the divine authority over man from his very infancy: secondly, because the child who fulfils it will require in after life no special command for its guidance in dealing with his own children: thirdly, because in discharging its duties to its parents, the child is being effectually trained for the faithful discharge of all its duties to society in after life. Hence, it appears to be of greater importance that children should perform their duties to their parents, than that parents should perform their duties to their children. And yet, these two classes of duties are so interlaced and so dependent on each other, that practically speaking, the one can scarcely be performed if the other be neglected.
The bearing of these remarks on our present subject may be easily seen. We have already studied in detail the duties of parents to children; and as we have proceeded, a sense of their importance has been growing upon us, until it is in danger of lessening the importance of the corresponding duties of children to parents. In coming, therefore, to the careful examination of these duties, we must assign to them their legitimate place in point of importance, with the other duties of home; and from what I have just written, I think it will be seen that this place is the first.
“Honour thy father and thy mother.” The obligation imposed here on children includes three distinct duties: love, reverence, and obedience. To begin with the first: a child is obliged to love its parents with a constant, practical, supernatural love. It may seem, indeed, superfluous to impose a commandment of filial love on children; for their very nature inclines them to it without any external motive. Yet if we look closely into family-life, we shall be forced to acknowledge that, even with the commandment superadded to the instinct of nature, there are many children who do not love their parents, and what is worse, there are many children who are deliberately unkind, and even cruel to them. I have myself witnessed an instance of filial degradation worse than cruelty itself; I have seen a grown-up daughter raise her hand and strike to the ground an aged, unoffending parent. Therefore, from what we witness in the world around us, it becomes evident that the commandment of filial love is by no means unnecessary.
But very often a child loves its parents with a limited, varying love. It loves them, only because they are kind to it, and only as far and as long as they are kind to it. This is not the filial love intended in the divine Commandment. The kindness of a father or a mother is not the basis or motive on which the commandment is grounded; and the error of thinking that it is has led to many a sin of undutifulness. No; it cannot be too thoroughly instilled into the mind of a child, that its parents represent God Himself to it, in their love of it, in their care for it, in their authority over it—that in fact its parents are given to it as earthly symbols of its heavenly Father; yet not mere symbols of Him; but His agents also, by whom He governs it, and supports it, and trains it in the way of holiness. The child, then, ought to look on its parents as the representatives of God, and it ought to love them as such. They are an expression of His love for it; and they are the most precious gift and blessing He has outwardly conferred on it; and in each of these respects, they ought to be loved by it, no matter what be their individual characters, or how they discharge their parental duties.
But you will ask, perhaps, how can one love a harsh, cruel, tyrannical parent, who shows no love on his own side, and who possesses no single amiable quality that would attract and engage the love of a child. It cannot be doubted that this is hard; for such a parent, in many respects, neither represents nor reflects the divine love, nor the divine care, nor the divine authority in his parental relations. Yet, as the earthly author of the child’s being, he is the representative of its divine Creator; and he can never forfeit this character, no matter what be his short-comings and his dereliction of duty. He is, therefore, still to be loved with that constant, practical, supernatural love which is the child’s first duty to its parent. But grace is required for the performance of this duty in such circumstances. Unless the mind of the child be divinely illumined, the reflection of the Creator, being obscured and disfigured, will be hardly discerned or discovered in the unworthy parent. The will also must be attracted supernaturally to what naturally it has so much cause to consider hateful and repulsive. But let the unhappy child, who finds himself treated with uniform, systematic cruelty by an unnatural father or mother, remember that his Father who is in Heaven looks upon his position with infinite compassion; and that if he prays to Him and firmly relies on Him for assistance, trying hard at the same time to do what lies in him, God will never fail to give light to his understanding, and strength to his will, by which he will be enabled to do with ease and alacrity, what to flesh and blood seems morally impossible. God will help him to be kind and attentive and affectionate to one who repays his kindness, his attention, and affection with only a sneer or a curse. He will help him to go on earning by his daily toil, ease and comfort for one who deprives himself of both. He will help him in the sacrifice he makes of his own future prospects—of his settlement in life—of other affections than those which bind him to home—when the sacrifice is made for the sake of filial affection, and in spite of the thanklessness with which it is received.
A child’s love for its parents, then, must be founded on something far deeper than their mere dispositions towards it; otherwise its love will not be constant. And yet it is little, if it be not constant and enduring, even until death. What great merit is there in loving our parents only during the sunny hours of their life, while they are able to help themselves, and the world smiles on them? If we turn away from them, when they are in want or suffering; if we do not stand by them, when they are old and helpless; if we do not do all we can to cheer and comfort them, when sorrow and misfortune press them down in the dust; above all, if their unkindness and unamiableness, and perhaps their irregular, sinful lives estrange us from them and turn our better feelings towards them into dislike and aversion, of what use to them, and of what merit before God can be that love which we so ostentatiously profess for them, and which nevertheless is incapable of so slight a strain upon it, and which is altogether so selfish and unsacrificing and ungenerous?
Filial love should also be practical; that is, the child ought to do all in its power to secure its parents’ happiness. I have known married sons and daughters to live in a high social position, while their parents were eking out a miserable existence on a wretched weekly or monthly allowance, supplied to them grudgingly, and on the harsh condition, that they should never visit the fashionable homes of their children. I have known young men to give expensive parties, to surround themselves with the most extravagant luxuries, to squander, in fact, their income in the most foolish, reckless manner, while their parents, whose hard earnings had made them what they were, lived uncared for, and unprovided with the ordinary comforts of life, in poor, desolate cabins away in the country. I have known also old men and old women, living out the remnants of their lives in parish workhouses, while their daughters were spending on dress, and their sons on drink, more than double the amount that would keep their parents at home in comfort. And yet if any one of those children were to be taxed with want of filial love, he would, most probably, deny the charge indignantly, and try to convince you, as he had already convinced himself, that he did love his parents; and that he visited them occasionally (except indeed in the last case, where there would be danger from the parish authorities); and that he would be sorry to hear of their illness or death. The truth is, he has a kind of love for them; but it is not that practical love that he ought to have.
Again, there are children who never have a kind word for their parents. They use them roughly; put them aside as inconveniences; give them no voice in domestic matters; and show in every way by their manner and treatment, that they would get on much better without them. I wonder do those children ever reflect on the pain their unfilial conduct occasions; do they ever study the cause of the sad look that often comes into their father’s face, of the tears that often well up in their mother’s eyes. Perhaps they attribute the one and the other to the pettishness and doting of old age. But they have a deeper cause. That father and mother, in their early married days, painted a beautiful picture of what their children were to be to them in their declining years. It was a picture of a bright and happy home, with a sunset splendour on it that seemed to make it a blending of earth with Heaven. There was an aged couple in it that had fought the battle of life together, bravely and nobly for their children. But they were relieved long ago from all further worry and trouble by those same children who now surround them—in the picture—with every comfort that loving hearts can devise; children who anticipate their every wish, who shield them from every care and sorrow, and who still look up to them, and honour them, and feel proud of them, as they did years and years gone by. The picture, thus painted by the young married couple, was gazed on and spoken of with rapture by them, and their constant thought of it, and their frequent conversations about it nerved them through many a dark, difficult passage of their lives, and led them to speculate, and to invest their present comfort and happiness on the chance of their having them paid back with interest in their old age. Well their old age has come upon them; and their investment has proved a failure; and their picture a mockery. Their picture! alas it has to be torn from the memory; but the process is a painful one, for the memory is near the heart. No wonder, then, that the father of an unloving child looks sometimes sad, and that its mother sheds frequent tears. The sadness and the tears are not without their cause, nor are they the result of dotage. They are for what ought to have been but will never be.
O child, whoever thou art, that hast a living parent, love him, cherish him, comfort him in every way thou canst. No matter about his shortcomings, his peevishness, his unthankfulness: make him happy: the sun of his life may have been often clouded—let the sunset be as bright and glowing as thou canst make it. He will thank thee in his heart, though his words be curt and stinted; it may be, that on his death-bed he will show the gratitude that he felt all through, although he never before spoke it. But even though it be never spoken, when thou standest by his grave, thy own heart’s consciousness will thank thee, and thou wilt never have to bear through life the bitterest remorse that the heart can feel—the remorse of having clouded a parent’s last days with sorrow, and of having made him pray that those days might be shortened and he himself might be at rest.
The third characteristic of filial love is that it should be supernatural. I have already partly explained this characteristic; but it will not be amiss to dwell on it a little longer than I have yet done. Our love for our parents, then, ought not to be wholly grounded on that instinctive sentiment of our nature that inclines us towards them from our infancy, and that goes on either growing into a deep and passionate, although natural love, under the influence of their own loving kindness to us; or else withering into a mere barren feeling of regard, on account of the harshness or the neglect with which they treat us. Such love would be a purely natural love, unworthy of a Christian and not meritorious of eternal life. We have been raised by our Baptism to a state in which God known by Faith, is the central object to which all human love must be directed. We must regard creatures partly as His gifts to us, and partly as coins that have His image impressed on them more or less distinctly. Our love for them therefore, if it is to be supernatural, must come from this twofold light. We must love the gift for the Giver; and we must love it all the more, because it is a revelation of the Giver. It follows from this, that the more a creature reveals our Creator to us, the more that creature is to be loved; and as no created thing contains a higher natural revelation of God than our parents; hence, no created love of anything formally external to us can ever legitimately supersede the love that we owe to them. We must not, therefore, love our parents chiefly for themselves; nor may we love them solely because they are gentle and amiable to us. It is true, indeed, that we love them naturally all the more, when they are to us all that parents ought to be, but even in this case, our deeper love of them must be the result of the greater brightness with which the image of God shines out in them.
There may be some who will object, that this teaching is too subtle and metaphysical for children; and that it ought to be quite enough to tell them to love their parents, because God has commanded them to do so. With regard to the former objection, it must be remembered, that all the truths of faith are more or less metaphysical, in the sense in which the word is used above; yet they must be taught to children, and brought home to their apprehension by suitable images and illustrations. Why then should not a practical duty be explained to them in like manner? Are they to be let grow up in ignorance of a moral obligation of the highest importance to themselves and to society, because it requires some patience and trouble to explain to them its nature and characteristic qualities? But I scarcely think we need be metaphysical in telling a child that everything it has, everything around it, everything that is good to it, is a gift from its loving Father in Heaven. It may afterwards be easily led to regard all those things as signs or tokens, or images of that Father’s goodness, and it may next be taught to consider its parents as the highest of those images, and to love them as such. Everything necessary for it to know on this subject is thus explained to it without either mystery or metaphysics.
As to the assertion, that it is enough to tell children to love their parents because God has commanded them to do so; I admit that it is enough, provided you tell them what kind of love they are bound to give them. But as we have already seen that there are many kinds of filial love that do not satisfy the divine Commandment, there is danger of teaching serious error, unless these different kinds be carefully explained.
