“And,
first, the urgency of parental responsibility appears in a solemn,
and even an awful manner, from the nature of the parental relation
itself. Perhaps we fail to appreciate its momentous nature by reason
of its very commonness and of our familiarity with it. Wherever human
society is, there the parent is. Every man was once a child; every
human existence begins in a parental relation. Our perpetual
familiarity with the light of the sun disqualifies to appreciate its
glory and beauty as we would, were we to behold it but once before
entering on a life of blindness. Thus, we are so accustomed to see
the child proceeding from the parent, that we are incompetent to
perceive the solemn nature of the relation. Let us seek to gain a
juster view by comparing the human race with that order of angels
than which man was made a little lower. It is every way probable that
to the angels the power of reproduction, bestowed on Adam and Eve in
paradise, appeared the most marvellous and splendid part of this new
creation of the Almighty. For the bliss and glory of the elect angels
there is no multiplication. The only increase within their reach is
that arithmetical addition which may arise out of their individual
progress in knowledge, love and happiness. The eternal adoption of
Gabriel is assured against all the powers of hell and accidents of
time. But Gabriel cannot multiply his happiness and transmit it to
beloved offspring of his own likeness. Except as he has communion
with his fellow-angels who began their career with him, he remains
solitary in his blessedness. But the glory of the Divine beneficence
towards the human race appears in this, that the parents, without
alienating anything of their own immortality, are able to multiply
immortalities in ever-widening and progressive numbers. Thus, by the
multiplications of the generations of men, the field of the Divine
love and benevolence is widened as time flows on, until the subjects
of the Divine bene factions and instruments of the Divine glory on
earth unspeakably surpass in number the heavenly hosts. It may be
beyond our skill, as it is unnecessary to this argument, to
distinguish and allot the several parts of the agency which belong to
God and to the human instruments in the origin of a new human soul.
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 any thing 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.
“The
command to the first pair to be fruitful and multiply and replenish
the earth was given as a blessing of paradise, and while man was
unfallen. To understand it, we must remember that covenant which was
made with Adam as the representative of the race. God gave him an
easy law to keep, with the implied promise that, by keeping this
command, he should 'enter into life.' Had Adam stood his probation
successfully, he would have been lifted from his mutable position
into a permanent adoption of life, making both his holiness and his
happiness indefectible. And we have every reason for believing that
he would have raised all his posterity to that state along with
himself. He stood as their representative. When he transgressed,
'they sinned in him, and fell with him.' It is hard to believe that
God would have broken that representative union when about to result
in the glorification of the race which he had established, and which
he inexorably maintains when it issues in universal ruin and
condemnation. Neither his goodness nor equity would prompt such
unequal dealing. Had Adam been confirmed in glory, the law would
doubtless have held by which 'he begat Seth in his own likeness after
his image.' All his posterity would have been holy and happy. Cain
would have lived a saint, innocent of his brother's blood, and Abel
would never have felt the murderer's blow. As the successive
generations of men extended, parentage would have extended and
multiplied immortal happiness until earth surpassed heaven. Such is
the magnificence of that plan which the Creator proposed to execute
through man's parental relation.
“But
the amazing plan was marred. The malice of Satan saw in this feature
also his opportunity to execiate a mischief as much more gigantic
than the seduction of his brother-angels, as the aggregate of the
whole series of human generations is greater than the number of the
devils. It was, indeed, the infinite refinement of malice which he
taught one of his heathen servants to cherish, when he inspired the
Roman despot to wish that all the people of Rome had but one neck,
that he might decapitate all at one stroke. Thus Satan saw that
humanity had then but one head. By poisoning this, he would taint all
the vast future body with spiritual death. Thus he vainly hoped he
would usurp that very power, the power of parentage, which God had
bestowed to be the instrument of multiplying blessedness, and he
would turn it into an inlet of spreading and boundless sin and
misery. By poisoning the spring-head, he would at once poison the
whole stream in all its widening course, until it disembogued its
innumerable drops — each drop in the flood a lost soul — into the
ocean of eternity. Thus it is that we owe to this malignant
perversion of God's plan of benevolence, that every parent now
transmits to the child he loves, along with the gift of existence,
the deadly disease of sin.
“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? And if this parent
professes to have felt his blessed skill in his own soul, to be
rejoicing in the Divine cure, and is yet callous to the ruin he has
transmitted to his own child, he is a monster, with a heart harder
than a wild beast's. There are hereditary diseases of the body. Their
indications pierce the parent's heart like barbed arrows, even when
suspected in the beloved child. To see, beneath the hectic glow of
the cheek, else so beautiful, the fatal sign of the worm at the root
of life; to remember that it was from your own blood the sufferer
drew the poison — this awakens the pity and love of the father to
all its depths. There is an authentic illustration in the last days
of the first Napoleon. As his life was consumed upon the gloomy rock
of St. Helena by that fearful malady, cancer of the stomach, one of
the few alleviations allowed him by his jailers was the presence of a skillful Italian physician, Dr. Automarchi. The French officers near
him relate that, when death was recognized as certain, the emperor
laid his dying commands on his compatriot to return to Italy, visit
his only son, watch over his health, and endeavor by every resource
of his art to ward off the dire inheritance of his father's disease.
Thus spoke the parent's heart in this man so ruthless and hard, who
had reared his throne upon a pyramid of human skulls, and ground the
nations of Europe under the chariot-wheels of his ambition! How could
it speak otherwise, cruel though that heart was to others? How can
you, O Christian! fail to bring your child to the great Physician of
souls, to be healed of the deadly contagion you have conveyed into
him?” - R.L. Dabney, Parental Responsibilities, Discussions: Volume
1
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