The Perfect Father
The more perfect a father is, the more of a sovereign will he be; the better he is as a sovereign, the more excellently will he fulfil his functions as a father. The forms and sanctions of his authority will vary, but the less formal it grows the more real it will become. There is nothing so absolute as the paternal reign in its earliest form. The infant is the most helpless creature in nature; depends for food, clothing, tendance, everything essential to its continued being, on other hands than its own; and the parent’s sovereignty is then a sovereignty of carefulness, a mindfulness which feels every moment that the child can live only in and through those to whom it owes its being. Here the law governs the parent, though the law be love; and in obedience to it the work, as it were, of creating a subject still proceeds, and only as it is well and thoughtfully done can the subject ever be created.
But in due course the new mind and will awake, and sovereignty then assumes a new form, becomes legislative and administrative, frames laws which the child must be now persuaded, now compelled, now beguiled to obey. Here the authority is autocratic, yet with an autocracy which is most tender where most imperious. But the child becomes a youth, and the sovereignty again changes its form, becomes flexible in means that it may be flexible in end, loving the boy too well to tolerate his evil, so watching him that he may by a now regretted severity and a now gracious gentleness be trained and disciplined to good. And when the youth becomes a man, the sovereignty does not cease, though its form is altogether unlike anything that had been before; it may be the fellowship by which the old enrich and ripen the young and the young freshen and enlarge the old; it may be by a name which filial reverence will not sully, or a love and a pride which filial affection will delight to gratify; or it may only be by a memory which, as the years lengthen, grows in beauty and in power. But in whatever form, the sovereignty of a father who has been a father indeed, is of all human authorities the most real and the most enduring.
—A. M. Fairbairn.
Where children honor their parents, there God dwells, there God is honored.
—The Talmud.
Alternate Reading: Matthew 26: 20-35.