Section LXXVIII. The Inner Revelation and the Conscience. (Concl'd) · SECTION CXLV.

Marriage as productive is the basis of the more extended family, which, like marriage, is not a merely natural but essentially a moral relation. The family members stand to each other either in the relation of equality, as husband and wife or as brothers and sisters, or in that of super-ordination and subordination, as parents and children. The relation between parents and children is the first inequality among men, and the presupposition and type of all other relations of super-ordination and subordination. Parents and children stand to each other in the relation of moral personalities, and hence also of mutual moral duties; parents have, in relation to their children, preponderatingly the duty of forming, and hence of educating, during the progress of which, however, the constantly and necessarily therewith-connected duty of sparing, rises gradually to greater prominence as the development advances, until finally it predominates, and the child has attained to its moral majority. As, however, in a process of normal development, the parents also constantly advance spiritually and morally, hence they always retain their super-ordinate relation to the children even as matured; their formative influence on the children can never cease, and never gives place to a relation of moral equality with them. The children, on their part, continue always, though not in a constantly like manner, subject to the parents in reverential obedience, which, however, as itself resting upon love to God, is ever also conditioned thereby.

The difference between consorts and blood-relatives rests on the difference between moral and natural communion. In both cases the communion is not only spiritually-moral but also corporeally-natural. With consorts, however, the bodily-natural communion rests on an antecedent moral communion; and with blood-relatives the moral communion rests on the precedent corporeally-natural communion; the former become corporeally one because they love each other, the latter love each other because in blood they are already one; the former proceed from an original state of separation, toward union; the latter tend from their original union to a state of separation; blood-relationship proper precludes sexual communion. The fact that relatives are bound to each other by especially close bonds of love [Gen. xiii, 8, 9; xiv, 14 sqq.; xviii, 23 sqq.; xxix, 13 sqq.; Exod. xviii, 5 sqq.; Ruth i; ii, 20; Luke i, 38, 40, 58; comp. Job xix, 13; Psa. xxxi, 12; lxix, 8], does not conflict with the more general love of neighbor.

In the family begins, now, moral society with all its normal differences. Husband and wife do not as yet constitute a society, for they are one flesh; nor do parents and children form one, for although they are one spirit, yet they stand to each other in the relation of super-ordination and subordination. Persons who are entirely alike, and who stand to each other in absolutely like relations, constitute indeed a multitude, but not a society; where there is no vital all-guiding nucleus, no throbbing heart for the body, no soul for the acting members, there is no living whole, no society. Inequality, unlikeness, lies in the essence of every moral society,—not an inequality of the moral rights of personalities, but an inequality, a difference, of spiritually-moral position in and relation to society. Parents are the first princes, and true princes are the fathers of their people; patres was the title of distinction of the Roman senators; “elders” is used in a like sense for the leaders of moral society in almost all the free constitutions of antiquity and also of the church. Parents are the guides of their children by the of God, for children are a gift of divine [Gen. xxi, 1; xxv, 21; xxix, 31; xxx, 6, 17 sqq.; xxxiii, 5; Exod. xxiii, 26; Deut. vii, 14; Ruth iv, 13; 1 Sam. ii, 21; Psa. cxxvii, 3; cxxviii, 3; comp. 1 Tim. ii, 15]; therein lies the right as well as the duty of the parents. Guiding the children in God’s name, standing in God’s stead for them [Eph. vi, 1; comp. Lev. xix, 32], they have not only a right to reverential obedience, but also the duty of reverence-awakening training. Parental love is per se strictly natural, hence it is found even in the natural man [Gen. xxi, 16; xxxi, 28, 43, 50, 55; 1 Kings iii, 16 sqq.; Isa. xlix, 15; Matt. ii, 18; Luke xv, 21 sqq.; John iv, 47 sqq.], and consequently very much more so in the pious [Gen. ix, 26, 27; xxi, 11, 12; xxii, 2; xxiv; xxviii, 1-4; xxxvii, 3, 34, 35; xlii, 36 sqq.; xliii, 14; xliv, 22, 30; xlv, 28; xlvi, 30; xlviii, 10 sqq.; Exod. ii, 2 sqq.; 2 Sam. xii, 16 sqq.; xiii, 30 sqq.; xiv; xviii, 33; xix, 1 sqq.; Prov. x, 1; xv, 20; Jer. xxxi, 15; Matt. ii, 14; Luke ii, 35, 44; John xix, 25].

It is the part of parents to cultivate their children into morally-matured personalities; this is not merely a right of the parents, but also of the children, and hence, for the former, a duty; they are to impart to their children the spiritually-moral attainments of their own spiritual development, and consequently also those of humanity in general, so that the children shall not have to go through again, in the very same manner, the same absolutely new-beginning development as the parents, for this is simply the manner and characteristic of nature-objects, but that they may place themselves in the current of history, and learn and appropriate to themselves its spiritual results, and then, in their turn, carry them further forward. All spiritual forming of the, as yet, spiritually immature is an historical working,—an initiating of the, as yet, immature spirit into the current and working of history. Now, as the child is in fact to ripen on into a morally-mature personality, and yet from the start already is, both in essence and in faculties, a moral personality, hence the forming of the same by the parents is never a strictly exclusive influencing, and hence, on the part of the child, never a merely inactive receiving, but always also a spiritually-moral co-operating of the child, a constantly increasing initiative self-forming of the same, so that consequently from the very start there must always be united with the formative activity upon the child, also a sparing bearing toward it; and such a forming is in fact education.—Education,—which, as aiming at the moral goal, namely, harmony with God and with the totality of moral being, must always be at the same time a natural and a spiritual, a special and a general forming, directed toward bringing the child to God and to God-sonship [Gen. xviii, 19; Deut. vi, 7; xi, 19; xxxi, 12, 13; xxxii, 46; Psa. lxxviii, 3 sqq.; xxxiv, 12; Isa. xxxviii, 19; Eph. vi, 4; comp. Luke ii, 27],—is a characteristic manifestation of rationality; the brute needs no education, as it is never destined to become free and moral. All created beings are, in their essence, naturally good; but it is only by education that they become morally good, and truly rational and free. Wherever the morally uncultured and unmatured undertake to establish liberty, there it soon results in unbridled license, and, as an attendant thereof, in the coarse tyranny of the stronger. In the want and requirement of education are implied a recognition and admission that the entire true essence of the child is not conferred upon it immediately by nature, but must he first acquired by free spiritual acts, and that too not by merely individual acts, but by the spiritual appropriation of the already extant spiritual attainments of humanity,—by spiritual obedience toward the spiritually and morally mature. The child cannot educate itself, nor can it on the other hand simply be educated without its own moral co-operation; but it must willingly let itself be educated.

Reverence for parents, and, what is only another phase of the same thing, for the aged in general, is regarded by all nations, with the exception of the totally savage, as a sacred duty [comp. Gen. ix, 23]; and it is a sure sign of a deep moral corruption of the spirit of a people where there is a declension in the reverence of children for parents, and, in general, of youth before old age; and more especially so when this declension is not undeserved. In a morally-normal development-course of humanity it is absolutely inconceivable that old age should so deeply decline as to fall behind the wisdom and moral maturity of the youth; the superior wisdom and knowledge of divine and human things would, in virtue of the higher inner and outward experience, continue to be the imperishable possession of old age; and it belongs among the most distressing evidences of the sinful disorder of the human race, that in fact old age does frequently sink back to childishness, and needs to be taken under the guardianship of the children. If any one can regard this as the natural order of life, let him also regard as foolish and groundless the pain which every, not totally perverse, child’s heart experiences at the sight of such a sinking of the gray head, before which it would fain only bow in reverence.

Children have, toward their parents, predominantly the duty of appropriating, which, however, gradually passes over more and more into a self-forming, though without ever entirely breaking off from the formative influence of the parents; and the sparing bearing of the children toward the parents can never, save under utterly corrupted conditions, be transcended by their formative bearing toward them. The formative influence of the children upon the parents, that exists indeed from the very beginning, can, even after they have become morally mature, assume only a secondary rank. This predominatingly-receptive relation of the children to the parents is that of filial reverence [Gen. xlv, 9 sqq.; Exod. xx, 12; Lev. xix, 3; Prov. xxx, 17; Matt. xv, 4; Eph. vi, 2], the outward expression of which is obedience [Prov. xxiii, 25; Eph. vi, 1; Col. iii, 20]. Christ himself is the pattern also in this [Luke ii, 51; John xix, 26].—Children, when entering into wedlock and establishing a new family, enter thereby indeed into a greater independence of the parents [Gen. ii, 24], but the bond between parents and children, the duty of the former to care for the weal and the honor of the latter [Gen. xxxi, 48 sqq.; Deut. xxii, 13 sqq.], and that of the children to show reverence for the parents, is not thereby dissolved.

The right of parents to obedience, and the duty of children to show it, are, however, essentially conditioned on the agreement or disagreement of the parental command with divine will, and can never become per se and unconditionally binding, For this right is not a merely natural but a moral one; the merely natural dependence of children on their parents extends, as with brutes, only so far as the state of actual helplessness and need extends; the moral dependence, however, is a permanent one that is never to be dissolved. The moral right of the parents to obedience rests on the fact that they do not represent their own individual will, but the divine will. And for this very reason the guilt of parents is so deep when they misuse their moral mission to educate in God’s name, and lead the child away from God, placing their own sinful will in the stead of the divine will.