Note 17 — "THOU AND THY HOUSE."

Nothing can be more melancholy than to hear a mother say to a child, "We must not let your father know any thing about this." Where such a course of reserve and double dealing is adopted, there must be something radically and awfully wrong, and it is a moral impossibility that any thing like godly order can prevail, or right discipline be carried out. Either the father must, by inordinate severity or unwarrantable strictness, be "provoking his children to wrath," or the mother must be pampering the child's will at the expense of the father's character and authority. In either case, there is an effectual barrier to the testimony, and the children suffer grievous injury. Hence, Christian parents should see well to it that they always appear before their children, and also before their servants, in the power of that unity which flows from their being perfectly joined together in the Lord. If, unhappily, any shade of difference should arise in reference to the details of domestic government, let it be made a matter of private conference, prayer, and self-judgment in the presence of God; but never let the subjects of government see such a manifest proof of moral weakness, for it will surely cause them to despise the government.