The principle of home-government is love,—­love ruling and obeying according to law.  These are exercised, as it were, by the instinct of natural affection as taken up and refined by the Christian life and faith.  This government implies reciprocity of right,—­the right of the parent to govern and the right of the child to be governed.  It is similar in its fundamentals to the government of the state and church.  It involves the legislative, judicial and executive functions; its elements are law, authority, obedience, and penalties.  The basis of its laws is the Word of God.  We may consider the whole subject under two general heads, viz., parental authority, and filial obedience.

1.  Parental authority is threefold, legislative, judicial and executive.  The two latter we shall more fully consider under the head of home-discipline.  The legislative authority of the parent is confined to the development of God’s laws for the Christian home.  He cannot enact arbitrary laws.  His authority is founded on his relation to his children as the author of their being; “yet it does not admit,” says Schlegel, “of being set forth and comprised in any exact and positive formularies.”  It does not, as in the old Roman law, concede to the parent the power over the life of the child.  This would not only violate the law of natural affection, but would be an amalgamation of the family and state.  Neither is the parental authority merely conventional, given to the parent by the state as a policy.  It is no civil or political investiture, making the parent a delegated civil ruler; but comes from God as an in alienable right, and independent, as such, of the state.  It does not, therefore, rest upon civil legislation, but has its foundation in human nature and the revealed law of God; neither can the state legislate upon it, except in cases where its exercise becomes an infringement upon the prerogatives of the state itself.

Parents are magistrates under God, and, as His stewards, cannot abdicate their authority, nor delegate it to another.  Neither can they be tyrants in the exercise of it.  God has given to them the principles of home-legislation, the standard of judicial authority, and the rules of their executive power.  God gives the law.  The parent is only deputy governor,—­steward, “bound to be faithful.”  Hence the obligation of the child to obey the steward is as great as that to obey the Master.  “Where the principal is silent, take heed that thou despise not the deputy.”

Here, then, we have the extent of the parent’s authority, and the spirit and manner in which it should be exercised.  His power is grafted on the strength of another, and should not extend beyond it.  Its exercise should not run into despotism on the one hand, nor into indifferentism on the other.  According to the vagaries of some religious sentimentalists and fanatics, it is supposed that religion supersedes the necessity of parental government.  They think