GOVERNMENT IN THE HOME.

BY MRS. S. M. I. HENRY.

GOVERNMENT is of God; he only knows how safely to administer it. He only can teach any man how to exercise authority so as to escape

those  tangles which culminate in injustice, despotism, or anarchy. The father who, like Paul, will not   “dare to speak of any of those things which Christ hath not wrought”  by him, to make the children  “obedient, by word and deed;”  “who accepts God's model of government, and adopts his method, in which no coercion is to be found, but absolute liberty, together with sympathetic teaching and patience with failures, will escape those domestic wars which have so often made the heart of childhood like a battlefield, strewn with the corpses of Faith, Love, and Hope, while every evil passion fed upon them, as unclean birds of prey on carrion.

Let us look into God's method for a moment, remembering that we, at our largest, are only as little children toward him who is the Father of all (we shall never be  “grown up”  until we shall have put on immortality; perhaps not then, very soon); and also remembering that child and parent sustain precisely the same relation to God, each to be taught by the same word, amenable to the same law, saved by the same gospel;  that the tall father and the little child must come with the same daily confession of sin to the same Christ, and obtain the same pardon, in the same way, or be alike lost to hope and heaven.

God's method, which is given for our example, is never to forget the weakness of the weak, never to lose sight of environment and its influence, and to demand nothing that cannot be given. According to the measure of the need which our sinning, ignorance, and stubbornness have created, is the outlay of God's love and patience toward us. He asks of his children only the best that they can do, with all that he can supply for their help out of the richness of his grace. He never stops to measure this grace by our worthiness to receive, or ability to appreciate. Such is the attitude of the great Father toward  his 

children; and this is to be the model according to which the earthly father must plan his government, if he  would preserve it from ruin.

God should be the recognized head of the home, and his word the one law by which its affairs are administered. There is in most men that which causes a desire to govern in his own right; and the little child in the home, or anything weaker than himself, is apt to feel the heavy hand of that despotism into which government is sure to degenerate as soon as man's word is made to supplant that of God's One would suppose that any Christian father among his earliest lessons would have learned that God must have the first place in the mind of his child; but the deplorable fact is that some never learn it. The child hears, day after day:  “I tell you.”   “Do you not hear me ?”  “Why don't you do as I say?”  “My word is law in my house!”  “I’ll teach you better than to say,'Why?' 

 to  me!”  with all of which he is made to feel the weight of the human hand so

heavily  that he is in terror of the divine power which it is supposed to represent; and finally, by and by, in sheer desperation flees from the one  and ignores and disbelieves the other, rushing out into the world to take his place in its affairs, filled with the principles of coercion which have  been practiced on him, and which, like active disease germs, he throws off upon society, to the injury of everything in life which he touches.

The child should be made to know, from his earliest moments, that he is responsible to no one but God for the manner in which he deals by father, mother, dog, cat, himself, and everything to which he is related. He should also know that father and mother consider themselves alike responsible to God for the manner in which they deal by him; that God's word is the only law to which he is ever to answer; that at any point where the word of any man, including his own father, should come in conflict with God's word, he must stand by the word of God; that, in so far as he and his parents keep God's word together, they are on the same level. I do not expect any but Christians to understand this, but I  sincerely  hope all such who read this will see the truth which I have written.

No father will suffer, but, rather, largely gain, by refusing to take on the petty dignity of that little, brief, selfish authority which his son must rapidly outgrow as he rises to man's estate; but, instead, will cover himself with that fatherliness which is from the indwelling Spirit of love, and which will command veneration, more and more, as his son comes on to age, and takes upon himself the same office and responsibilities.~

ADVENT REVIEW & SABBATH HERALD

  Feb. 2, 1897   Vol.  74, No 5

(Written from the Sanitarium Battle Creek MI)