In confirmation of this natural authority of the father, our author brings a lame proof from the positive command of God in scripture: his words are, “To confirm the natural right of regal power, we find in the decalogue, that the law which enjoins obedience to kings, is delivered in the terms, Honour thy father, p. 23. Whereas many confess, that government only in the abstract, is the ordinance of God, they are not able to prove any such ordinance in the scripture, but only in the fatherly power; and therefore we find the commandment, that enjoins obedience to superiors, given in the terms, Honour thy father; so that not only the power and right of government, but the form of the power governing, and the person having the power, are all the ordinances of God. The first father had not only simply power, but power monarchical, as he was father immediately from God,” O. 254. To the same purpose, the same law is cited by our author in several other places, and just after the same fashion; that is, “and mother,” as apocryphal words, are always left out; a great argument of our author’s ingenuity, and the goodness of his cause, which required in its defender zeal to a degree of warmth, able to warp the sacred rule of the word of God, to make it comply with his present occasion; a way of proceeding not unusual to those who embrace not truths because reason and revelation offer them, but espouse tenets and parties for ends different from truth, and then resolve at any rate to defend them; and so do with the words and sense of authors, they would fit to their purpose, just as Procrustes did with his guests, lop or stretch them, as may best fit them to the size of their notions; and they always prove like those so served, deformed, lame, and useless.
For had our author set down this command without garbling, as God gave it, and joined mother to father, every reader would have seen, that it had made directly against him; and that it was so far from establishing the “monarchical power of the father,” that it set up the mother equal with him, and enjoined nothing but was due in common to both father and mother: for that is the constant tenor of the scripture. “Honour thy father and thy mother, Exod. 20. He that smiteth his father or mother, shall surely be put to death, 21:15. He that curseth his father or mother, shall surely be put to death, ver. 17, repeated Lev. 20:9, and by our Saviour, Matt. 15:4. Ye shall fear every man his mother, and his father, Lev. 19:3. If any man have a rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother; then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and say, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice, Deut. 21:18–21. Cursed be he that setteth light by his father or his mother, 27:16. My son, hear the instructions of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother,” are the words of Solomon, a king who was not ignorant of what belonged to him as a father or a king; and yet he joins father and mother together, in all the instructions he gives children quite through his book of Proverbs. “Woe unto him, that saith unto his father, What begettest thou, or to the woman, What hast thou brought forth? Isa. 45:10. In thee have they set light by father and mother, Ezek. 22:7. And it shall come to pass, that when any shall yet prophesy, then his father and his mother that begat him, shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live, and his father and his mother that begat him, shall thrust him through when he prophesieth.” Zech. 13:3. Here not the father only, but the father and mother jointly, had power in this case of life and death. Thus ran the law of the Old Testament, and in the New they are likewise joined, in the obedience of their children, Eph. 6:1. The rule is, “Children, obey your parents”; and I do not remember that I anywhere read, “Children, obey your father,” and no more: the scripture joins mother too in that homage, which is due from children; and had there been any text, where the honour or obedience of children had been directed to the father alone, it is not likely that our author, who pretends to build all upon scripture, would have omitted it: nay the scripture makes the authority of father and mother, in respect of those they have begot, so equal, that in some places it neglects even the priority of order which is thought due to the father, and the mother is put first, as Lev. 19:3. From which so constantly joining father and mother together, as is found quite through scripture, we may conclude that the honour they have a title to from their children, is one common right belonging so equally to them both, that neither can claim it wholly, neither can be excluded.
One would wonder then how our author infers from the fifth commandment, that all “power was originally in the father”; how he finds “monarchical power of government settled and fixed by the commandment, Honour thy father and thy mother.” If all the honour due by the commandment, be it what it will, be the only right of the father, because he, as our author says, “has the sovereignty over the woman, as being the nobler and principal agent in generation,” why did God afterwards all along join the mother with him, to share in his honour? can the father, by this sovereignty of his, discharge the child from paying this honour to his mother? The scripture gave no such licence to the
