SERMON IV.

DISOBEDIENT TO PARENTS.

"This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be.... disobedient to parents.”—2 Tim. iii. 1, 2.

To understand the changes which have passed upon the Church, it is necessary to transport yourself a generation or two back; and, having become familiar with the spirit of that time, so far as can be ascertained from the conversation of old people, and the perusal of written books, the recollection of traditions, and the inspection of other monuments which survive the wreck of time, to draw it into comparison with the spirit of the times in which we live. To the faithful and true striking of this balance, much wisdom is necessary; for in conversing with old people, you must make allowance for the hallucinations of age, and the halo of glory with which the season of youth is surrounded. And in studying the monuments of a former time, it requireth much skill indeed to recompose their fragments into a true picture of the living and moving persons to whom they belonged. These are the difficulties which attend the right judgment of times past. And to make up a true judgment of times present, there are difficulties of an almost equal amount,

though of a very different kind: which are, first, the vanity of our own age, reflected from our own selves, who form part of it; secondly, the collected vanity of all the living who speak and who write of it; thirdly, the exaggeration of things near at hand; and, fourthly, the oblivion of things now gone by: all which together do mightily warp the estimation which men commonly make of the times in which they live. Of all those difficulties which beset our undertaking, I am most fully aware, and desire to bear them in mind, and with the more humility to submit myself to the teaching of the Holy Ghost. For though I have conversed much with old men, and, I may say, delighted to give them reverence, and lived the most part of my youth at their feet listening to their account of former times; and though my reading and study have been much amongst the writers of the former ages of the Church; I am not ignorant that there ofttimes ariseth from this very familiarity with the olden times, such an admiration of antiquity as to make us unjust to the times in which we live. Vanity and pride and malice, also, lead us to identify ourselves with the illustrious dead, in order that through the shade of their greatness we may wound the illustrious living. On all which accounts, I do feel the task I have undertaken, of showing these to be the characteristics of the times in which we live above the times of our fathers, or any other times of the Church, to be one of a very perilous and responsible kind; and therefore, cleansing myself of all malice or partiality towards the present, and of all predilection to a former

age, I desire devoutly to submit myself to the teaching of God's Spirit, and to show forth unto you what he showeth unto me.

How far the feature in the text, "disobedience to parents," is a character of the times in which we now live, each one, perhaps, will best settle for himself, by comparing the reverence of his own children, or the children whom he knows, with the reverence which he bore to his parents, or the marks of reverence and obedience which he remembers to have heard his father speak of. For my own part, so far as my means of observation have extended, I can freely declare before God, that the deterioration of the age in this capital point can hardly be over-estimated or over-stated. I call it a capital point, because it is that from which all reverence of a superior floweth as its fountain-head, and in the right occupation of which ariseth all obedience, whether to the magistrate or to God. I do not say that in the nature of things it is before our duty to God; because it is itself secured by the sacrament of baptism, which is a divine ordinance; but I do say, that in the order of teaching it comes before the other, seeing God, by the sponsorship of baptism, constitutes parents the teachers of his fear unto their children, and doth require both faith and obedience to proceed through the medium of our parents up to him. And certainly, in the order both of knowledge and of practice, as well as of dignity, the obedience of parents standeth before the obedience either of masters or of magistrates, and is so placed in the Ten Commandments which God spake with his

own lips. Now, in this rudimental, and, as it were, mother-source of all obedience, which standeth foremost in the text amongst the relative obligations, I say that these last times of the Church do indicate a most sad inferiority and degradation beyond all other times of which we have any record. And when I say so, I do not mean to lay the blame upon the children merely, but upon the parents much more; seeing I believe it to be ordained of God that the health and strength of every relationship should depend upon the superior rather than the inferior member, should exist as a grace descending from above before it is as an offering ascending from beneath: whereof he hath given us both the proof and the example, in that he loved us before we loved him, and freely adopted us into the condition of sons out of grace, not out of any respect unto our deserving. In like manner, I believe it is his honour of the higher rank and the elder branch, always to prefer them so far as to begin the progress of amelioration; and it is his judgment upon them so to order it that, through their neglect and unfaithfulness, things should fall away into deterioration. It is not, therefore, so much the disobedience of children, as the relaxation of discipline on the part of parents, or rather the general signs of dissolution and breaking up in that most natural and most venerable relationship, to which I have to direct your attention. Now, I do perceive four great signs and proofs hereof, so large and conspicuous as to be perceptible and intelligible to every one; which I lay down before touching upon those of a less conspicuous kind.

The first is, that the legislature has been forced to interfere with an enactment, in order to prevent the children of our laborious poor from being overwrought to the injury of their health and growth; a thing which I suppose is unparalleled in the history of Christendom. Yet true it is, that so far, upon the one hand, had the carelessness of parents over the well-being of their children, and, upon the other hand, the covetousness of masters to make gain, extended, that between the two the risk became imminent, and the legislature was fain to interfere, and prevent children from being employed in labour beyond a certain number of hours in the day. I believe that in most instances the root of this most horrid feature of the times is worse than we have represented it, and that it really arose from the selfishness of the parents, who in good times, being intent upon their lusts, used the labour of their children in order to purchase so much indemnity from labour, and indulgence in the alehouse, to themselves, and, in bad times, used the labour of their children in order to help the straitened circumstances in which the whole family was found;

-selfishness, brethren, the selfishness of pleasure and lust, having become too strong for the affections of the father and the mother in the breasts of men. how different this from the times which every Scotsman above thirty years of age remembereth, and which many parts of our Church enjoy still, when parents, being industrious and economical, would pinch themselves to send their children all the year round to the parish school; and look for no labour at