p. 145The Father

No more truthful and beautiful conception of the paternal office in a Christian household, can be conveyed than by saying that Fatherhood is Love, all-powerful Love, that it should occupy an “awful throne”—one surrounded with affection and veneration, in the home; that its authority should be at once a sacred and a “patient” power; and that its right exercise must result in healing, at their very roots, the inveterate sores of which society complains.

Yes,—fatherly love and authority, acting in the name and place of God, would be to that sick, perverse, and overgrown child,—the youth of the nineteenth century,—a “patient power” which

“Folds over the world its healing wings.”

We need in the Home, as it is now assailed by rampant errors, subversive of God, of authority, of order, reverence, and love,—the conviction firmly seated both in the soul of the parent and in that of his offspring,—that a father is in God’s place; and that, just as he must make it almost the one chief aim of his life to have his children so consider and reverence him, even so must he do himself his utmost to be to his dear ones the living image of God’s love and patient power.

As the great secret of establishing over the minds and hearts of all within the household the lovingly accepted influence of his august power, lies in being most like to God in word and deed, so fathers will bear with us while we request them to read and ponder well one or two passages from men, who have been most truly what we wish to make our readers,—kings over the minds and hearts of those who called them “Father.” We shall thereby show all the more easily and convincingly what is the nature, and what the extent of a father’s authority.

In what Fathers are to Imitate God

St. Thomas Aquinas, called by the veneration of Catholic ages “the Angelic Teacher,” says that Christian men are bound to imitate God, to copy in their conduct what is revealed to us of His outward manners,—His truthfulness, wisdom, meekness, patience, justice, liberality, mercy,—and so emulate all the other divine attributes in so far as a created being can follow and imitate the Creator.

Another, and an older saint, Bernard of Clairvaux, teaching a Pope his duties,—in an age when the Pope was revered as the Common Father of Christendom,—thus addresses him:

“What is God? The all-powerful will, the most loving power, the everlasting light, the unchanging reason, the supreme felicity;—who createth souls to make them partakers of His own nature;... who inflameth them with zeal for His service, and maketh their zeal fruitful by His grace;... who imparteth the strength to practice Godlike virtue;... who filleth them with His Godhead to make their bliss perfect;... and who rendereth their supreme felicity unchangeable by making it eternal like Himself.”¹1Lib. v. de Consideratione, c. ii.

What more magnificent than this faculty of becoming within your homes the living image of this Goodness which ever yearns to pour out on its intelligent creatures an ever fuller and fuller measure of its exhaustless wealth of love, till, with the dawn of eternity, it can overflow all boundaries, like the victorious ocean-tide, and encompass the loved object within its rapturous depths? Cannot a true father become more loving, more generous, more devoted every day?

Let us show how this divine ideal should be one of practical daily and hourly life, to every man who holds toward others the sacred relation of father,—how it is imitable by him in every one of his actions,—in the discharge of every possible duty inside and outside his home.

When men of the world,—high or low,—are told to take God as their ideal or pattern, they are apt to think and say that the perfection demanded is too high above them, and impossible of attainment. “You might as well,” they are tempted to say, “tell us to understand what is the nature of the fire which burns eternally in the bosom of the Sun or of the light which it sheds through the universe. We have near our hand means of procuring heat and light for our dwellings without being at the trouble of studying the nature of the solar atmosphere or of the mighty globe it surrounds.”

The Divine Exemplar walking in the ways of Men

True. But our “Sun of righteousness” has come down to us, veiling his light and tempering the heat of his near presence, that our weak senses might bear this very nearness. We have seen Him,—not as the glorious Being who dwells above in light unapproachable and manifests His unclouded essence and perfections to the gaze of the Blessed,—but as a child growing from helpless infancy through boyhood and youth,—a true man in all his ways and affections and virtues, as well as very God in the powers which he wielded to confirm his mission and his teaching.

It is these sweet human virtues, of every-day life, especially as practiced within the lowly home of his mother,—that we would have parents study and acquire by practice. Then only could they teach and enjoin them on their dear ones.

To fathers in the household (and, in their own measure, to all persons having authority over others) is the divine exhortation addressed, “Be you... perfect as also your Heavenly Father is perfect.”²2St. Matthew, v. 48.

I. Fatherly Love should be all-embracing, like God’s

Let yours be perfect love! And how few there are among the wisest, the most learned, the most experienced of good fathers even, who understand what that supernatural charity, that perfect, all-embracing, all-enduring love is, of which He who is Father over us all affords us the sweet and wonderful model!

It embraces His Enemies among the Heathen

To those among His human creatures who are most forgetful of Himself, most bitterly hostile toward the very notion of a Godhead,—who blaspheme Him by their words and their writings, who make of their whole lives one long act of rebellion and defiance of His authority, who are upon earth the embodiment of irreligion, impiety, vice, and wickedness,—see how good, how patient, that Fatherly Love is! Not one of His laws is suspended with respect to the evil-doer, not one of the manifold provisions of nature ordained by that Almighty Love is withdrawn. The sun still rises over him, despite the countless days so horribly misspent, and the sweet repose of night will come again after a day of sin, and God’s angels will guard from danger the life of the enemy of God, as unvarying and patient in their watchfulness, as are the stars which look down from the firmament on the sleep of the wicked and the repose of the just.

The great sun in the heavens continues, day after day and year after year, to dispense its light and vital warmth to the man whose whole existence is an outrage to the Creator; the air he breathes loses nothing of its wholesomeness, the heavens above his head and the earth and ocean around him, are unchanged for him in their magnificence and their beauty.

It embraces Bad Christians

There is, however, another order of things in which the unspeakable patience and tenderness of that same Fatherly Love is displayed to all its children without exception. Take the “Household of the Faith,”—that most wonderful creation and world of all in which man knows himself to bear toward his Maker the real relation of son,—not in that vague and remote sense in which every being that owes its existence to the Almighty may be said to be his child,—but in that lofty and sublime sense in which all who are born by baptism of the blood of the Only-Begotten Son, are most truly partakers of his sonship. There are in the house of the Father very many who disgrace their sonship, who live a life unworthy of the unbaptised and the heathen, who are most keenly conscious of their own unworthiness, and deplore, while they persist in it, the monstrous inconsistency of leading a beastly life in a heavenly station.

Its Infinite Mercifulness

And yet, all this while, the Fatherly Love in its unwearied patience, in its unutterable tenderness, in its awful reverence for those who are the Sons of the household,—throws over the secret sins of the fallen an impenetrable veil, deals with their most open sins with infinite mercifulness,—urging the guilty soul by incessant touches of shame and regret and longing to return to that Goodness who cannot refuse to forgive,—and throwing over every step made by the returning sinner, the darkness of a secrecy so full of respect, and pity, and gentleness for the humiliated and repentant soul! Think, O fathers, of that most divine story left us by the Incarnate Mercy, and which is the history of His dealings with the soul of every one of us,—the Parable of the Prodigal Son.³3St. Luke, xv.

If we would, therefore, apprehend that Infinite Love in all its fatherly tenderness and generosity, we must conceive it not only as all-embracing, having no manifest preference for some of its children over the others, and excluding openly none of the undeserving from the light and warmth it dispenses; but we must conceive of it as drawn in a special manner toward the erring and the fallen. This is the supernatural aspect of paternal charity. And this point, on which we dare not insist too much, every right-minded and true-hearted parent will instinctively understand and appreciate.

Fatherly Love of St. John the Evangelist

A most beautiful instance of this irresistible impulse of true fatherly love, as understood among Christians, occurred in the very infancy of the Church, and is related by one of her earliest and most eloquent historians.⁴4Eusebius, “Ecclesiastical History,” book iii., c. 23; where he quotes as his authority Clement of Alexandria.

St. John the Evangelist, while visiting one of the churches of Asia Minor, had remarked among the crowd a young man whose mien and bearing bespoke uncommon gifts. The preternatural insight of the apostle of charity read in that soul a mighty capacity for all great deeds, if properly cultivated,—and which, if neglected, might become a power for evil. The youth was then in the first fervor of his conversion, and, amid the fearful temptations to evil which beset youth in that most beautiful but most licentious land, he needed special watchfulness and care from his religious guides.

St. John, whose angelic life and winning gentleness had so powerfully attracted the young convert, intrusted him, on his departure for Ephesus, to the local bishop. “In the presence of Christ, and in the hearing of thy people,” the apostle said, “I give this youth to thy keeping.” The trust could not be refused; it was even accepted with readiness. As it often happens, however, the very fervor of the youth lulled the bishop into a fatal security. He fancied that one so good and so generous had nothing to fear from the seductions which assailed every sense on that enchanted shore, and, more particularly, from the company of his young pagan friends and associates. The strict discipline in which the young man lived in the bishop’s house, was relaxed after he had been baptized and confirmed. It was thought that the sacramental grace would prove a sufficient protection against the manifold evils of pagan life and conversation.

Human respect—the fear of being true to conscience in presence of the dissolute or the impious—together with the powerful incentive to sensuality where the whole world around him ministered to the senses, soon caused the unguarded youth to fall, and to fall to the lowest depths of guilt and crime. He was outlawed, and betook himself to the mountain passes, where he became the chief of a band of highway robbers, the boldest, bloodiest, and most reckless of them all.

When the aged apostle returned to that city, he missed his protégé among the clergy and select youth of the Church. “Where is the youth that I and Christ with me intrusted to thee in presence of thy flock?” were the first words the fatherly heart could find in its alarm. “He is dead!” was the answer. “Dead! how, and when?” the apostle demanded. “Dead to God and to all virtue,” was the mournful reply.

John would not be satisfied until he had learned all, and ascertained where he was likely to find his prodigal. So, though in extreme old age, broken by labor and suffering, he would not rest till he had brought the lost sheep to the fold. It was in vain to represent to him that the wild mountain tracts in which the robbers dwelt were almost inaccessible to man and beast, or that the men of blood who found shelter and impunity there, spared neither age nor sex; the apostle set out without a moment’s delay, repeating to the recreant bishop, who tried in vain to oppose his mad project: “Oh! what a guardian have I set over the souls of my brethren!”

“When he reached the retreat of the robber band,” the historian continues,—“he was surrounded by their scouts. He had no thought of avoiding them and no fear of the violence they might offer. He only shouted to them: ‘I have come to seek your chief; bring him to me!’ The other came fully armed for a hostile encounter; but, on perceiving the man of God, he turned and fled. John, who was on horseback, followed him, crying out as he went: ‘Why fly from thy father, my son? I am but an old man, feeble and unarmed. O my poor child, stop and listen: lay aside all apprehension. There is yet hope for thee. I shall be answerable to Christ for thee. I am willing to die for thee, as He did, and ready to give my soul for thine. Only stop, and trust to me; for Christ it is who sent me after thee?’”

The Wolf becomes a Lamb

The fugitive, overcome by the appeals of that love he knew so well, turns on a sudden and falls prostrate at the feet of his pursuer. He has cast away his weapons, and with his face buried in the dust, he pours forth a flood of tears, concealing the while that guilty right hand which has shed so much innocent blood. John is kneeling by his side, mingling his tears with those of the guilty one, and protesting to him solemnly that he will not rest till he has obtained his pardon from Christ. He has no horror of grasping, despite the other’s resistance, that murderous right hand which tears of true repentance are already beginning to cleanse from its stains. He brings him back in triumph to the church in which he had been baptized, remains with him in prayer, vigils, and fasting, pouring forth his whole soul to the Great Shepherd of the flock, to implore His mercy on this lost one which he had reclaimed.

The apostle would not quit his side, calming the terrors and remorse of that guilty soul, by sweet and gentle words, “charming the evil spirit out of him,”—says the historian, by the accents and artifices of his fatherly love. Nor would he commit the care of that sick soul to any one till he had led him step by step to expiate his enormous guilt, to repair by the most heroic acts of virtue the scandals of his sinful life, and to become foremost in generous goodness as he had been foremost in crime.

It is, we would fain believe, a rare thing to have to recall the sinner from such depths as these. And yet, considering what we daily see, and hear, and read of,—there must be very many homes in every class of society, where deep guilt in some child demands all the arts of a father’s love to soften the sinner’s heart, and all the resources of his tenderness to raise him up to repentance and newness of life.

We do not, however, hold up the mirror of these Godlike examples, in order to make parents behold therein these extreme cases, in which deep guilt or degradation in a child could only be remedied by heroic charity in a parent.

The love we would inculcate here, is that love which expends itself in the thousand and one little home-charities of every ordinary day and hour, that go to make the household so deeply happy in the sunshine of a father’s affection, while it tends to make every child there good, and to keep him good.

How the Divine Ideal is realized in the Family

Yes, yes; you laughed, dear reader, at our effort, a moment ago, to make you take the Sun in the Heavens as the model of your practical tenderness toward your dear ones. We know it,—it is the sun nevertheless that imparts to the glorious planets of our system their brightness and their vital warmth. But let the planets go! Have you a garden near your home? or beautiful fields and woods around it? or lovely flowers within it? and are you one who takes a hearty pleasure in beautiful things?

Then feast your eyes on the colors and shades which clothe earth and sky around and above your home at morning, or noon, or sunset; look into the face of every flower that blooms in your garden or at your window,—as if in each you read a delightful page of that endless book of beauty, which is only the pale reflection of His charms, in whom alone resides the essence and perfection of all that is most fair and most bright. Know you not that the magnificences of earth and sky, and the varied beauties and fragrance of grove and garden, of cloud and daintiest flower,—are as much the creation of the Sun in the Heavens, as are the brightness of the evening or the morning stars?

And so,—you, who are the suns of your own homes,—you can by the light of your examples and the warmth of your fatherly love, make the souls, the hearts, and minds and lives of your dear ones more beautiful and fair to look upon, than the most gorgeous flower that ever bloomed beneath the sun. Will you refuse to give to these souls, to these dear and precious lives their coloring and their beauty in the eyes of God and men and angels?

II. How to Love Wisely

Let your love be a wise love. Wisdom is indispensable to all who have the charge of training and governing others. But, you will ask, what is that wisdom which should temper the father’s love in his government of the household and the rearing of his children? Wisdom, in so far as it regards the understanding, is the knowledge of the peculiar nature of things, of the purposes for which they were made, and of the means to make each thing fit itself to its purpose. In practice, it is the directing of others according to this clear knowledge of their destinies and their capacities.

The wise architect, besides the thorough knowledge of the principles, rules, and practice of his art, seizes in every work of his the object for which he builds, and exactly suits the building to the uses for which it is destined. He is the best and wisest builder who so plans and executes every structure intrusted to him, that it is the best of its kind,—the best dwelling-house for rich or poor, the best church edifice in view precisely of the worship to be held therein,—the best for the climate, and for the people; the best for durability, and the best in proportion to the means of those who rear it.

The wise father studies carefully the dispositions of each of his dear ones,—just as the musician studies the capacity of his instrument and the power of each of its chords,—just as the wise gardener acquaints himself with the habits of all and each of his fruit trees, so that each one may be so trained, so cared for, as to yield its utmost in due season.

The Divine Art of Training Children

The art of cultivating, developing, governing souls (we say nothing of bodily strength and health, in themselves so exceedingly important), is of all arts the most difficult, requiring the highest wisdom, skill, and prudence. We have known parents,—nay, we see such every day,—who seem gifted with almost a divine insight into child-nature, and endowed with somewhat of the divine skill in managing their various capacities and dispositions. They display a like superhuman prudence in training such as are weak, or perverse, or fractious,—addressing themselves, in their method of education, to the affections of each child, calling forth what is noblest and purest and best in their nature, and making them, even from earliest infancy, to love to do what is repugnant to sense or to inclination.

Unwise Love

Other parents there are,—excellent in many respects, religious, exemplary, gentle,—under whose care children grow up like fruit trees that are never pruned, or grafted; around whose roots no loving hand has dug to loosen the soil or to manure it; from whose trunk hurtful parasites or insects have never been removed. The trees are of the choicest kind, the soil is of the most favorable, and grafts from the very same stock produce, in the neighboring garden, fruits the most abundant and delicious. But the neighboring gardener makes of fruit-growing a labor of love and a science.

We have seen parents,—themselves the sad subjects of inherited moral disease, love their children with a love so absorbing and so unwise, that, knowing them to be prone to the parental weaknesses, they could nevertheless refuse nothing to their appetites;—nay, they would glut these poor diseased little ones with every aliment most fitted to develop in them the fatal germs of the ancestral vice!—This was not loving either wisely or well.

Example of Heroic Wisdom in a Father

The heroic love of one father, and the marvelous success that rewarded his culture, deserve to be held up to the admiration of our readers.

He was a lawyer,—the son of a man whose transcendent talents might have placed him in the front rank of any profession, but whose incorrigible intemperance had marred all his brilliant prospects, consigning himself to the madhouse and leaving his six orphan children to utter poverty. The son of whom we speak here, was the last of four brothers, and the youngest but one of the whole family. His mother died when the boy was in his third year, a year after his father had become a hopeless lunatic, and six months after giving birth to her sixth child. The two youngest children were adopted by a maiden aunt; of the four others we need make no further mention than to say, that the oldest son drank himself to death before he was thirty.

Our little hero found in his aunt and adopted mother, that supernatural love and wisdom begotten of true piety, which enabled her to discharge the duties she had assumed toward her little orphans, with rare devotion and success. The infant,—a little girl,—was saved and brought up by a miracle of tender nursing, so fragile was the life she inherited. The little brother was watched over with more than a mother’s care. The slender means of his aunt were so husbanded by her that she could send him to college in due time,—and his progress in learning was prodigious. His nature was a most passionate one; but the piety imbibed at home and sedulously fostered by his admirable masters, as well as the recollection of his father’s failing and fate, acted on the boy and the youth as a powerful restraint.

It was his good fortune, on entering college, to meet with a spiritual director who had known his father well, and who was most anxious to save his boy from the terrible enemy of his family and happiness. He encouraged the latter to come to him as to a second parent in all his troubles, taught him to overcome his fierce outbursts of temper, and to refuse his appetite everything that was a delicacy or for which he felt a strong liking. On his leaving college, he addressed him in almost the words of the good Father Clifford to the celebrated naturalist, Charles Waterton;⁵5“One day, when I was in the class of poetry, and which was about two years before I left the college (Stonyhurst) for good and all, he called me up to his room. ‘Charles,’ said he to me in a tone of voice perfectly irresistible, ‘I have long been studying your disposition, and I clearly foresee that nothing will keep you at home. You will journey into far-distant countries, where you will be exposed to many dangers. Promise me, that from this day forward, you will never put your lips to wine, or to spirituous liquors. The sacrifice is nothing,’ added he; ‘but in the end it will prove of incalculable advantage to you.’ I agreed to his enlightened proposal; and from that hour to this, which is now about nine-and-thirty years, I have never swallowed one glass of any kind of wine or of ardent spirits.’”—Norman Moore, Life of Charles Waterton, prefixed to the “Essays on Natural History,” London, 1871. obtained from him a solemn promise of life-long abstinence from everything intoxicating.

The promise in his case, as in that of Waterton, was kept to the end of life. He grew to fame and to affluence as well, dying at the early age of forty-two, leaving five boys behind him, every one of whom was trained from his cradle not only in abstinence from wine and strong drinks, but even from tea and coffee. They were noble boys, healthy, robust, bright,—models of manly strength and beauty, as well as of all manly virtue. Their father made them his constant companions from childhood, making them delight in study and in the practice of all goodness. He asked them to do nothing which he did not do himself,—so that abstinence seemed to them no sacrifice. So far as we know, not one has ever turned aside for a moment from the path in which they had learned to walk with their excellent father.

Is not this the way,—approved by nature and blessed of God,—to neutralize and eradicate the fatal germs of ancestral weakness and vice? And was not this to love wisely and well?

Another Example of Wise Love in a Father

Another instance, in which a like fatherly wisdom saved his child from hereditary consumption,—may suggest a no less useful moral, and shall now be related.

A man of wealth and position had seen his wife and four children taken from him successively by that insidious and implacable distemper. One child, a daughter, was left to him. How could he save her? By a sort of inspiration he resolved to harden her frame, as she grew up, to every influence of the atmosphere, while accustoming her to simple and nourishing diet and to regular though not excessive out-door exercise. From childhood she was made to take a daily cold bath, and when vacation time came yearly for her father, he took her with him to the mountains, lived with her in the open air, in a tent, and made her swim for an hour every morning and evening, even through the cold autumn weather. She is now a lovely woman, the robust mother of a large family of children, whom she brings up after the manner she was herself trained. Will this method prove an effectual remedy to the inherited disposition to consumption? We shall not dispute it with the doctors, nor trespass on professional ground. But surely there is a virtue in generous abstinence, as well as in the healthful use of nature’s own appliances, besides the blessing which the God of nature bestows on all generosity and self-denial.

Sublime Example of the Rechabites

There is,—to confirm such fatherly wisdom and generosity as we would fain inculcate here,—a most memorable example left us in Holy Writ.

When the Hebrew tribes were painfully threading their way from Egypt through the frightful labyrinth of the Sinaitic Peninsula,—a family of Madianites,—who had, probably, known Moses during his long exile in their midst,—cast their lot with him and his people, renouncing the idolatry of their ancestors, and becoming thenceforward invincibly faithful to the one true God. Even when Israel had fallen away into licentiousness and corruption,—these generous converts only seemed the more bent on honoring the God of their choice by purity and austerity of life.

The fearful sensuality which characterized the Phœnicians and Canaanites, had made on these simple-minded Arabs so painful an impression,—that they refused to live in cities, lest they should become contaminated by the luxuries of city-life. A portion of them withdrew to the northern extremity of Palestine, and the remainder settled in the pastoral wildernesses of the south, not far from the cradle of their race. In the times of the early kings of Judah and Israel, when the majority of the people seemed to have given up forever the worship of the true God, and to sully their homes and lives with all the abominations of the heathen, the chief of this tribe of Cenites or Kenites was Jonadab, the son of Rechab. To preserve his descendants from this dreadful apostasy and its punishment, he bound them by solemn oath to drink no wine, to plant or possess no vineyard, to build no houses, and to live always in tents far away from the atmosphere of cities.

To this solemn engagement these Rechabites ever afterward continued faithful, affording so shining an example of constant purity, piety, and austerity amid the increasing degeneracy of the Israelites, that God allowed them to share in the ministrations of his temple,—as if they belonged to the priestly tribe,—and pledged Himself to perpetuate their race forever.⁶6Jeremias, xxxv. 19.

Even when the blood of the Apostle James was being shed near the Temple,—almost on the eve of its final destruction, the generous voice of a Rechabite “cried out protesting against the crime.”⁷7Eusebius, “Ecclesiastical History,” ii. 23.

God not to be surpassed in Generosity

We are not without proof that the Divine Goodness has magnificently kept his promise to this race of noble men. Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century mentions that he found the Rechabites to the number of one hundred thousand, fulfilling to the letter every part of the promise made to their glorious ancestor, tilling the ground, living in tents, pasturing their herds and flocks, and abstaining from everything which could intoxicate. In the present century, a European teacher, Dr. Wolff (1829), found the Beni-Khabr (sons of Rechab) to the number of sixty thousand in one place in Arabia, walking in the law of their fathers.

The conclusion must force itself on the serious-minded reader. Jonadab saw that to preserve himself, his brethren, and their descendants from physical degeneracy and extinction as a race, as well as from the deep guilt of idol-worship, he must adopt and practice absolute and perpetual simplicity, austerity, and purity,—utter and perpetual renouncement of all the luxuries of civilized life, and the pleasures of the table. He did not hesitate. And for nearly three thousand years there are the descendants of that man, beneath the gaze of the whole world, sacredly keeping to the promise made to God by their fathers! There is nothing like it elsewhere in profane history.

Surely, this generous parent and reformer loved his children wisely and well!

This is what one father did three thousand years ago,—a simple Arab, unused to all the devices ministering to the comfort and enjoyment of life, for which we have coined the lying name of progress;—he, this high-souled man who feared God and loved his children,—swore for them to be true to God and to be self-denying. And no lapse or length of time has made them swerve from their oath!

On what an “awful throne” did these glorious descendants of a true man place their father! And how truly did the “patient power” of that strong, wise, and fatherly love of long ago, cover his descendants and the world in which they dwelt with its “healing wings”—as if the might and love of Jehovah himself shielded them from harm amid the political revolutions that have never ceased to convulse their country,—more destructive in their effects than the simoom and its whirlwinds of burning sand!

Would that Christian fathers in our midst could nerve themselves to such generosity and self-sacrifice! God alone knows how deeply, how fearfully our nineteenth century needs it.

III. Liberality, Hospitality, Charity to the Poor

As to the other virtues which should distinguish the father in his government of the home,—we may dismiss them in a few words.

That he may ever be in the eyes of his dear ones the living representative of the divine perfection, let him be careful to add to the wisdom, and patient, all-embracing love, we have spoken of, the liberality and hospitality which make his home lovely to the friends or the strangers he admits to his table, or to the poor and the needy in whose behalf he acts the part of God’s open-handed steward.

Let him, no matter how hard has been his battle with the world in amassing wealth or securing comfort and independence, never allow his children to believe that his heart is set on what he possesses. This superiority to riches and possessions, this independence of all that men value most,—will be only a higher degree of likeness to the Heavenly Father, who is supremely independent of all created things, even while He ministers to our needs with such magnificent liberality, and decks heaven and earth with such beauty and splendor.

It is needful to a child’s estimate of his father’s greatness of soul, that he should find him ready to give up the whole world for God, and so drawn to the Infinitely Great and Good and Fair,—that he can only love all things outside of God in conformity to the divine will and pleasure.

Fatherly Love must be Firm and Authoritative

Wise and fruitful of good a father’s love cannot be, unless it be at the same time full of that gentle, calm firmness which will be obeyed. The will which enforces obedience willingly and lovingly in the Home, can never be one that is violent, fiery, impulsive, and, therefore, changing and inconstant.

A hot, imperious, wrathful disposition may enforce obedience in an army or on board a ship. There authority is despotic and irresistible,—every act of disobedience and mutiny having to be repressed by immediate and pitiless punishment. For no ship is safe, and no army can exist for an instant, in which the voice of the commander may be questioned or set aside by his subordinates.

In the family the father must govern by a mixture of genuine, enlightened love, and calm, indomitable firmness. All who are subject to him must feel instinctively that what the father wills, he wills lovingly, justly, reasonably;—and that his will is law.

It is scarcely possible, where a man is impulsive, passionate, and imperious toward his children,—that his commands can be regulated either by justice, reason, or wisdom. Hence, the minds of the children will rebel against them, though force may compel them to be silent and obey. Where, on the contrary, they know, from their parent’s habitual disposition, that he is himself governed, in every order he gives, by reason, calm judgment, and true love for their own welfare,—and where, especially, experience has taught them that he means what he says, and exacts compliance with his will,—there you may be sure to find neither disobedience, nor disorder.

Gentle Firmness and Persistency exemplified in Nature

Nothing is so wonderful in the certainty with which it accomplishes its purpose and overcomes obstacles seemingly irresistible, as the gentle and persistent working of the forces and laws of nature.

Take up a cocoanut on its native soil and when it has fallen in full maturity from the tree. Its shell is as hard, one would think, as iron, without a break or an opening on its surface. If you would get at the delicious substance within you must employ your whole strength to break the shell. And yet, if you plant that nut in the ground, under the conditions favorable to germination, the pulp within will put forth a little white leaf as soft as cream, and the growth and constant pressure of this soft and tender substance will pierce or burst the hard shell, opening a way to the imprisoned life, that in its time will become a stately tree.

See these ancient cities of Mexico, Central America, and New Granada, with the magnificent temples and palaces which attest the genius and civilization of races now passed away. One, who could have seen these mighty structures in all their glory, would have said that the great blocks of which they are built, and the skill with which these are put together, must surely defy the action of time. And yet the feeble and graceful creepers of the tropics, by sending their tiny roots into every joint and crevice, have separated huge block from block, rupturing and disintegrating the hard stone with its marvelous sculptures,—till the whole now offers to the eye of the traveler but a confused heap of fragmentary ruins.

There is, nearer home, another and, perhaps, a more startling instance of the resistless might of the silent and slowly-working forces of nature. We remember in the early spring of 1847, how a portion of the huge and majestic cliff crowned by the Citadel of Quebec, gave way suddenly, falling over and burying the houses and inhabitants that nestled at its foot.

The water had penetrated into what was at first a little narrow cleft in the rock. But water, in freezing, enlarges its volume with a force that nothing can withstand. So each winter the cleft grew in width, admitting a larger quantity of snow and rain and gravel. The alternate process of freezing and thawing went on silently, imperceptibly to the military men who watched in the citadel and the civilians who slept in conscious security beneath,—till one spring night the mass of half-melted snow and water was such that a single night’s frost completed the work of ages, detached a vast mass from the hillside, and sent it toppling over into the river beneath.

Even now there is, a little above the former rift, a new one that is yearly increasing, and which no power known to man can prevent, in its own time, from working a similar catastrophe.

The force of fatherly government should be thus gentle, constant, and irresistible. Children, servants, dependants of every kind, are perfectly conscious of this calm, unruffled, resistless temper of a parent. Even animals feel and obey it. The most spirited and fiery horses know when the hand that holds the reins is strong, firm, and gentle withal,—and they obey its direction and guidance implicitly. Not so when the man who guides them is fiery, impatient, and unsteady. They become feverish, nervous, fidgety, and ungovernable.

How Violence paralyzes the best Qualities

Need we say more? Let an example or two serve to impress this vital truth.

Napoleon the First was a man of surprising genius. He was not only the greatest of generals, but one of the greatest of legislators. Yet, it has been said of him by one who knew him well and intimately, that what his sword had won on the battle-field, his ungovernable temper lost him in the council chamber. He aspired to be the master of the world, and had at one time become the arbiter of Europe; but he had never learned to control either his anger or his tongue. He thereby made mortal enemies not only of the allied princes he could have bound to himself by gentleness and generosity,—but of his prime-minister Talleyrand, who knew how to dissimulate and be silent, and who became Napoleon’s evil genius and perfidious counselor.

His own brothers hated and opposed him. Before his death, at St. Helena, he said: “I have been spoiled by success. Circumstances and my own energy of character have been such, that from the instant I gained military superiority, I acknowledged neither master, nor laws.”

In other and far inferior stations we every day see men, who are remarkably successful as business or professional men, and whose home-life is one of disorder, discomfort, misery, and utter failure.

We know of one man whose great talent for organization and energy of character enabled him to colonize one of our loveliest valleys in the interior, and to found one of our most beautiful cities. Yet could he not wield over his own household that wise, gentle, firm sway without which American boys grow up spendthrifts and vagrants.

If the true father and the true man, for whom these pages are written, is sincerely desirous to see his home-life as blessed as his public life has been laborious, arduous, and successful,—let him learn well the lesson conveyed here. Let him practice self-restraint, and teach it to his children. Those who have never learned to govern themselves, are but ill fitted to govern others,—to govern children especially, who are so wise, so logical, so clear-sighted to perceive the monstrous contradictions between an authority which would impose laws and punish their infraction, while remaining itself lawless, unruly, and most unreasonable.