p. 4The Two Classes of Parental Duties

The state, we have seen, is composed of families. Every family has a head—the father. The mother is the natural companion and helpmate of the father, and shares his authority and duties. The parental authority is derived, as we have seen, not from the state, but from God Himself. Parents are, then, independent of the state in their natural rights over their children.

Your parental authority, dear parents, imposes on you two classes of duties towards your children. One class of duties regards the bodies and the temporal welfare of your children; the other concerns their spiritual and eternal welfare. These latter duties, being by far the most important, necessarily hold the first place; and the former obtain only a secondary importance, and must always remain subordinate to the latter.

Your first duty towards the bodies and the temporal welfare of your children is to protect and preserve their life. To seek to limit the number of your children by certain practices now in vogue is a most heinous crime. Read the thirty-eighth chapter of Genesis, and you will see how the divine vengeance overtook Onan for doing a “detestable thing.” Onan’s conduct was bad enough, but it did not amount to the murder of the innocents—a crime which threatens to become as common among men pretending to be enlightened Christians as it was among the immoral pagans of old. The flames of hell cannot burn too fiercely for those Christians who commit such enormous crimes in order to indulge their animal passions without restraint and escape the burden of parentage. Such persons are worse than brutes. The divine vengeance will not fail, sooner or later, to overtake them.

Next to life, you owe your children necessary food, clothing, and shelter, according to your means. You should be ready to endure sufferings and privations yourselves rather than allow your little ones to be a prey to the pangs of hunger or the inclemencies of the weather. The slothful, drunken, p. 5gambling, and dissipated parent who neglects to provide his children with the necessaries of life, or who deserts them, is an inhuman wretch, deserving of the execration of mankind and of the terrible justice of an avenging God.

You ought also to care for both the cleanliness and health of your children. When these are sick, both of you, that is, both the father and mother, should tenderly nurse them, sparing no labor, fatigue, or expense for their alleviation and restoration to health.

It behooves you not to lose sight of the great truth that man’s first duty in this life is to serve God, and that he cannot attain his final end, that is, perfect and endless happiness, unless he faithfully serve God. To serve God means to submit our whole being to Him and to His holy law, to submit to Him our body and its senses, our soul and its faculties; in a word, to regulate all our thoughts, words, and actions in accordance with His commandments. If we wilfully break a single divine commandment in some important point, although we may faithfully keep the others, we forfeit our salvation, according to the saying of St. James. This may be made clear by the following illustration: A man may not meet death by drowning, by disease, by a fall or some other accident, or by hanging himself, cutting his throat, or blowing out his brains; yet if he refuses all nourishment, or takes a sufficient quantity of poison, he will surely die. In like manner, a man may not deserve hell for cursing, for perjury, for theft, for adultery, or for drunkenness, if he refrain from these vices; nevertheless, if he fail to perform his religious duties or to discharge the obligations of his state of life, he is most assuredly deserving of eternal reprobation.