olomon tells us that where there is no vision the people perish (Proverbs 29:18). Where the revelation of God is not opened and proclaimed, there the crown rights of King Jesus are ignored, the duties and boundaries of civil, church, and family government are forgotten or abused, and God's people are left harrassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Solomon's proverb could easily be the theme verse for our century. The biblical fences which in earlier times defined the duties of church, state, and hearth are, in our time, trampled underfoot or nowhere to be seen. The major beneficiary of this blurring of the boundaries has been the civil government, and the major casualty has been the home. The following excerpt from a sermon of R.L. Dabney should both rebuke our low vision of parental responsibilities and tempt us to look to other generations of God's people for the examples we require.
"It is enough for us to know that God, by His mysterious works of creation and providence, does empower human parents for this amazing result-the origination, out of nothing, of a new being-and that a rational, immortal spirit. How solemn, how high this prerogative! It raises man nearer the Almighty Creator, in His supreme prerogative as master of all things, than anything else that is done by creatures on earth or in heaven. Angels are not thus endued. The responsibility of this relation is not fully seen by merely regarding the infant as a beautiful animal, organized, in miniature, after the kind of the parents. It is the mysterious propagation of a rational soul that fills the reflecting mind with awe. The parent looks upon the tender face which answers to his caress with an infantile smile; he should see beneath that smile an immortal spark which he has kindled, but can never quench. It must grow, for weal or for woe; it cannot be arrested. Just now it was not. The parents have mysteriously brought it from darkness and nothing. There is no power beneath God's throne that can remand it back to nothing, should existence prove a curse. Yes; the parents have lighted there an everlasting lamp, which must burn on when the sun shall have been turned into darkness and the moon into blood, either with the glory of heaven or the lurid flame of despair.
These, then, are the two facts which give so unspeakable a solemnity to the parent's relation to his children. He has conferred on them, unasked, the endowment of an endless, responsible existence. He has also been the instrument-if the unwilling, yet the sole instrument-of conveying to this new existence the taint of original sin and guilt. Can the human mind conceive a motive more tender, more dreadful, more urgent, prompting a parent to seek, for the beloved souls he has poisoned, the aid of the great Physician?
The Scriptures here are positive. The parent is commanded to "train up the child in the way he should go." Which is that way? He must "bring up the child in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." Which is that nurture? Popery, Presbyterianism, Rationalism, or Infidelity? At the time the training is to begin, the child is wholly unqualified to judge; the parent must judge for him. Now it fully admitted that neither divine nor human law gives a parent the right to force the tender mind of the child by persecutions or corporeal pains or penalties; or to abuse it, by sophistries or falsehoods, into the adoption of his opinions. But this power the providential law does confer: the parent may and ought to avail himself of all the influences of opportunity and example, of filial reverence and affection, of his superior age, knowledge, and sagacity, to reinforce the power of truth over the child's mind, and, in this good sense, to prejudice him in favor of the parental creed. And how potent is this influence! Does it not almost commit the spiritual liberty of the young soul to a human hand? How mighty the power of opportunity which the parent is thus authorized to employ to propagate his creed on another soul; while as yet the pupil is ignorant of the process wrought upon him, and incapable of resisting it! There is no power beneath the skies, authorized by God, that is so far-reaching, so near the prerogatives of God Himself; and for that reason there is none so solemnly responsible. When God has clothed you, O parent! with such powers, with results so beneficent and glorious, and has thus made you so nearly a God to your own children, do you suppose that you can neglect or pervert them without being held to a dire account? Hence, he who has perverted his own reason and conscience to mistake a lie for the truth, makes himself responsible, not only for his own destruction, but for the probable destruction of the children God has submitted to his guidance. Take heed, then, parents, how you hear and how you believe, not only for your own sakes, but for your children's sakes.
We have seen that the promise of a multiplying offspring was the blessing of paradise; that paternity was the splendid expedient
of our Maker for multiplying the human subjects of his blessings and instruments of his glory, and of making holiness and bliss the
sure, hereditary possession of the increasing multitudes of men, through the probation and adoption of their first father. We have seen
how, when Satan had essayed, with a stupendous, yet impotent malice, to pervert the invention of God to the propagation of sin and
death, our merciful father rendered his victory void through the woman's seed, thus causing redemption in the second Adam to spring
again out of the family tie. We hear him declare in Malachi 2:15, long after the fall, that his object in founding the family, in the form
of monogamy, was "to seek a godly seed." Thus the supreme end of the family institution is as distinctly religious and spiritual as that
of the church itself."
