 she evidently looks upon them with
suspicion, and an uneasy feeling that le père de famille est capable de tout
makes itself sufficiently apparent throughout the greater part of her writings.
In the Elizabethan time the relations between parents and children seem on the
whole to have been more kindly. The fathers and the sons are for the most part
friends in Shakespeare, nor does the evil appear to have reached its full
abomination till a long course of Puritanism had familiarised men's minds with
Jewish ideals as those which we should endeavour to reproduce in our everyday
life. What precedents did not Abraham, Jephthah and Jonadab the son of Rechab
offer? How easy was it to quote and follow them in an age when few reasonable
men or women doubted that every syllable of the Old Testament was taken down
verbatim from the mouth of God. Moreover, Puritanism restricted natural
pleasures; it substituted the Jeremiad for the Pæan, and it forgot that the poor
abuses of all times want countenance.
    Mr. Pontifex may have been a little sterner with his children than some of
his neighbours, but not much. He thrashed his boys two or three times a week and
some weeks a good deal oftener, but in those days fathers were always thrashing
their boys. It is easy to have juster views when everyone else has them, but
fortunately or unfortunately results have nothing whatever to do with the moral
guilt or blamelessness of him who brings them about; they depend solely upon the
thing done, whatever it may happen to be. The moral guilt or blamelessness in
like manner has nothing to do with the result; it turns upon the question
whether a sufficient number of reasonable people placed as the actor was placed
would have done as the actor has done. At that time it was universally admitted
that to spare the rod was to spoil the child, and St. Paul had placed
disobedience to parents in very ugly company. If his children did anything which
Mr. Pontifex disliked they were clearly disobedient to their father. In this
case there was obviously only one course for a sensible man to take. It
consisted in checking the first signs of self-will while his children were too
young to offer serious resistance. If their wills were well broken in childhood,
to use an expression then much in vogue, they would acquire habits of obedience
which they would not venture to break through till they were over twenty-one
years old. Then they might please themselves; he should know how to protect
himself; till then he and his money were more at their mercy than he liked.
    How little do we know our thoughts - our reflex actions
