cal jurisprudence. At present, it is not of these that I speak. It is only of the wants of the children, and the affection and duty of the parent. These wants are obviously equal in all; and, if the merits of all be equal, the affection of the parent should be the same, and his duty equal to all, who, with equal wants and equal merits, are consigned to his equal love. It is vain, now, to look for a justification of breaches of this equal duty, to periods of violence, in which it was necessary, for the happiness of all, that inequality of distribution should take place, that there might be one sufficiently powerful, to protect the scantier pittance of the many. These circumstances of violence are now no more subsisting, in the regular polities of Europe. The affections are allowed without peril to exercise themselves freely. The father of many virtuous children, may safely be to all, what he is to one; and if he lay aside this equal character, and, sheltering himself in the forced manners of barbarous and tumultuous ages, make many poor, that he may make one rich, he is guilty of a gross violation of his duties as a parent,—and the more guilty, in exact proportion to the value, which he attaches to the possession of the wealth so unequally distributed. Nor it is only to those whom he directly wills to impoverish, that he is guilty of a breach of duty; -he is equally guilty of it, in many cases, to the single individual whom he exclusively enriches,-if, in estimating what he confers, we consider the virtue and happiness, or vice and misery, that may arise from it, and not the mere wealth, which, in itself, is nothing. The superiority which is thus bestowed on a single individual, is a superiority that may, indeed, like every possession of power, lead to the exercise of corresponding virtues;-to the generous mind it may present, as it has often presented, only wider occasions of generosity;-yet beautiful as such examples may be, it is not what the general circumstances of our nature authorize us to expect; and the power of being thus generous,-when, without that dubious generosity, those who have been made dependent on it, may suffer, what perhaps it was not intended that they should suffer, is a power of too great peril to human virtue, to be rashly imposed upon human weakness.

Such are two of the great duties of parents,—those which relate to provision for the mental culture, and temporal accommodation of their offspring. I have mentioned, as a third duty, that of

tempering the parental authority, with all the kindness of parental love, which, even in exacting obedience, only where obedience is necessary for the good of him who obeys, is still the exacter of sacrifices, which require to be sweetened by the kindness that demands them. This duty, indeed, may be considered as in some degree involved in the general duty of moral education; since it is not a slight part of that duty, to train the mind of the child to those affections which suit the filial nature, and which are the chief element of every other affection, that adorns in after life, the friend, the citizen, the lover of mankind. The father who has no voice but that of stern command, is a tyrant to all the extent of his power, and will excite only such feelings as tyrants excite; a ready obedience, perhaps, but, an obedience that is the trembling haste of a slave, not the still quicker fondness of an ever ready love; and that will be withheld in the very instant, in which the terror has lost its dominion. It is impossible to have, in a single individual, both a slave and a son; and he who chooses rather to have a slave, must not expect that filial fondness, which is no part of the moral nature of a bondman. In thinking that he increases his authority, he truly diminishes it;-for more than half the authority of the parent is in the love which he excites,in that zeal to obey, which is scarcely felt as obedience, when a wish is expressed, and in that ready imitation of the virtues that are loved, which does not require even the expression of a wish, but without a command, becomes all which a virtuous parent could have commanded.

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LECTURE LXXXVIII.

ON THE DUTIES OF AFFINITY-PARENTAL DUTIES; FILIAL DUTIES; FRATERNAL DUTIES; CONJUGAL DUTIES.

In my last Lecture, Gentlemen, I arranged the duties which we owe to particular individuals, under five heads:-as arising from affinity,-from friendship,-from benefits received,-from contract, from the general patriotism which connects together all the citizens that live on the same soil, or under the protection of the same system of polity.

In considering the duties of affinity, we entered on our inquiry with those which belong to the first relationship of life,—the relationship that connects together, with a tie as delightful as it is indissoluble, the parent and the child. We begin to exist under the protection of the duties of others; the objects of a moral regard, of which we are soon ourselves to share the reciprocal influence; and, from the moment at which we are capable of understanding that there are beings around us who have benefited us, or to whom it is in our power to give a single enjoyment, our duties too commence, and life itself may be said to be a series of duties fulfilled or violated.

We are the objects of duty, however, before we are capable of feeling its force, or of knowing that we have ourselves duties to fulfil; and the nature of this primary obligation of the parent, of which we are the objects as soon as we have begun to breathe, and which death only can dissolve, was considered fully in my last Lecture. The preservation of the mere animal existence of the child, is an office of parental obligation, too obvious, however, and too simple, to require elucidation. Our attention, therefore, was given to the other duties which the parental relation involves ;—

in the first place, the duty of giving to him, whose wisdom or ignorance, virtue or vice, happiness or misery, may depend, in a great measure, on the nature of the instruction and example which he may receive,—such education as, while it trains him for all the honour and usefulness, which his rank in life may seem to promise to the reasonable expectation of the parent,--may not forget, that this life is but the commencement of immortality, and the thoughts and feelings, therefore, which it is most important to cultivate-not those which have relation only to worldly wealth and dignity, but those to which the proudest honours of earthly life, are but the accidents of a day. In the second place, even with respect to the short period of earthly existence, which, short as it is when compared with immortality, still admits of many enjoyments, which we may supply, or withhold, or lessen, and of many evils which we might have prevented,-the duty of affording to the child such a provision of the means of worldly comfort and usefulness, as is suitable to the circumstances of the parent,-and of affording this provision to the different members of a family, not in the manner which may seem best fitted to gratify the personal vanity of the provider, but in the manner that is best fitted to contribute to the happiness of all who, with a relationship that is precisely the same, if their merits and wants be equal, have a moral claim to equal regard, in the distribution that is to provide for those wants. In the third place, the duty of exercising with kindness the parental power; of imposing no restraint which has not for its object some good, greater than the temporary evil of the restraint itself, of making the necessary obedience of the child, in this way, not so much a duty as a delight,-and of thus preparing him to be, in other years, the grateful and tender friend of a parent whose authority, even in its most rigid exactions, he has felt only as the watchful tenderness of a friendship, that was rigid in withholding only what it would have been dangerous to grant.

Having considered, then, the duties of the parent, in all their relations to the being to whom he has given existence, let us now proceed to consider the reciprocal duties of the child. These arise from two sources, from the power of the parent, and from his past kindness. As morally responsible, to a certain degree, for the happiness of the child, it is evident that he must have

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over it an authority of some sort, without which there could be no power of guarding it from the greatest of all dangers--the dangers of its own ignorance and obstinacy. It is equally evident, that, as the author of all the benefits which a parent can confer, he has a just claim to more than mere authority. From the salutary and indispensable power of the parent, flows the duty of filial obedience; from the benevolence of the parent, the duty of filial love, and of all the services to which that love can lead. Obedience, then, is the first filial duty,-a duty which varies in the extent of obligation at different periods of life, but which does not cease wholly at any period. The child must obey, with a subjection that is complete; because he is incapable of judging what would be most expedient for him, without the direction of another; and no other individual can be supposed so much interested, in directing to what is expedient for him, as the parent, who must reap an accession of happiness, from his happiness, or suffer in his sufferings. The man should obey in every thing, indeed, in which the obedience will not involve the sacrifice of a duty, but only some loss of comfort on his part; yet he is not like the child, to obey blindly; for the reason which required the blindness of obedience, does not exist in his case. He is capable of weighing accurately duty with duty; because he is capable of seeing consequences which the child cannot see. He is not to obey, where he could obey only by a crime; nor, even when the evil to be suffered would be only a loss of happiness to himself, can he be morally bound to make himself miserable, for the gratification of a desire that, even in a parent, may be a desire of caprice or folly. Where the duty of obedience, in such cases, should be considered as terminating, it would not be easy to define by words; since the limit varies, not merely with the amount of the sacrifice required, but with the extent of former parental favour, that may have required a greater or less return of grateful compliances, from the tenderness of filial obligation. I need not add, that, in any case of doubtful duty, that a virtuous son will always be inclined to widen, in some degree, rather than to narrow, the sphere of his obedience.

As the duty of obedience flows from the necessary power of the parent, in relation to the ignorance and weakness of those who are new to life, and therefore need his guidance, the filial duties of another class flow from the benefits conferred by the parent