Mandments, Touching the Honour Due to Parents. The Fifth Sermon
Now followeth the second table of God’s law, which (by the help of God’s Holy Spirit) I will declare as briefly unto you as I have already gone through the first. And as the first contained the love of God, so doth the second teach us the charity due to our neighbour; instructing all men what they owe every one to his neighbour, and how we may in this world live honestly, civilly, and in quiet peace among ourselves. For our good God would have us to live well and quietly. But we that will not know how to live well, nor yet obey his good commandments, do with our sins and iniquities never cease to heap upon our own pates an infinite multitude of miserable calamities.
This table containeth six commandments; the first whereof is, “Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God shall give thee.” Very well and rightly doth the Lord begin the second table with the honouring of our parents. For after our duty to God, the next is the reverent love that we owe to our parents, of whom, next after God, we have our life, and by whom we are from our infancy brought up with incredible care and exceeding great labour. Now the very order of nature doth require, that the most excellent and dearest things should always have the first and chiefest place.
And that this commandment may the more easily be un-
derstood, I mean to divide my treatise thereof into three parts: In the first whereof I will declare what degrees and kinds of men are comprehended under the name of parents: secondarily, I will search out what kind of honour that is, and how far it extendeth, which the Lord commandeth to give to our parents: and lastly, I will both touch the promise made to godly children, and thereupon conjecture and gather the punishment appointed for the ungodly and disobedient offspring. tn There is none so ignorant but knoweth what parents are. The Lord our God hath given us them for us to take of them our beginning of life, that they might nourish and bring us up, and that of rude and almost brutish things they might make us very men. Greater are the good turns that parents do for their children, greater is the cost and labour that they bestow on them, and greater is the care, grief, and trouble which they take for them, than any man, however eloquent soever he be, is able to express. And here is not the name of the father only, but also the name of the mother in express words set down in the law, lest she peradventure should seem and be contemptible without any offence to God, because of the weakness of her frail sex. The godly and virtuous mothers do feel and abide more pain and grief in the bearing, bringing up, and nourishing of their children, than the fathers do. For no small cause therefore have we the name of the mother precisely expressed in this commandment. We do also comprehend herein the grandfather and grandmother, the great grandsire and great granddame, and all other like to these. In the second place we do contain every man’s country wherein he was born, which fed, fostered, adorned, and defended him. Thirdly, we take princes and magistrates into the name and title: for the senators and princes are in the holy scriptures called the fathers and pastors of the people!. Xenophon was persuaded, that a good prince did differ nothing from a good father? Fourthly, there are to be reckoned under the name of parents those guardians, which are usually called overseers of fatherless children or orphans: for they supply the place of departed parents, taking upon them the charge and defence
[1 2 Kings v. 13; Isai. xxii. 21, and xliv. 28; Jer. xii. 10, and xxv.]
[34 Micah v. 5.] [2 Ἀλλὰ πολλάκις μὲν δὴ, ὦ ἄνδρες, kai ἄλλοτε κατενόησα, ὅτι ἄρχων]
[ἀγαθὸς οὐδὲν διαφέρει πατρὸς ἀγαθοῦ. ---- ΚΘ ΠΟΡΉ. Cyrop. Lib. vir]]
of their children, whom they must (for that affection ought to be in them) bring up, defend, and advance, even as they would do to their own and those that they themselves did once beget. Among whom also we must make account of such masters and workmen, as teach them an art or occupation: for of them young men and striplings learn some honest science, for every one to get his living honestly; and by them they are taught good manners, being thereby, after a certain sort, out of rude unpolished stuff made perfect seemly men. Fifthly,
the ministers, doctors, and pastors of the churches, are taken for parents, whom Paul himself did call by the name of fathers, not so much for the care and love wherewith they are affected toward the disciples and sheep of Christ his flock, as for because we are by them through the gospel begotten in Christ. In the sixth place, we must think of our cousins and kinsfolks, brother and sister, nephews and nieces, mother-inlaw and daughter-in-law, father-in-law and son-in-law, who are by alliance knit together3, as the members of the body are fastened with sinews. Finally, in the last place, old