Little Essays of Love and Virtue | Page 7

painful of all--differences in religious belief lead to

bitter controversy and humiliating recrimination. Such differences in
outlook between youth and age are natural and inevitable and right. The
parents themselves, though they may have forgotten it, often in youth
similarly revolted against the cherished doctrines of their own parents;
it has ever been so, the only difference being that to-day, probably, the
opportunities for variation are greater. So it comes about that what
James Hinton said half a century ago is often true to-day: "Our happy
Christian homes are the real dark places of the earth."
It is evident that the problem of the relation of the child to the parent is
still incompletely solved even in what we consider our highest
civilisation. There is here needed an art in which those who have to
exercise it can scarcely possess all the necessary skill and experience.
Among trees and birds and beasts the art is surer because it is exercised
unconsciously, on the foundation of a large tradition in which failure
meant death. In the common procreative profusion of those forms of
life the frequent death of the young was a matter of little concern, but
biologically there was never any sacrifice of the offspring to the
well-being of the parents. Whenever sacrifice is called for it is the
parents who are sacrificed to their offspring. In our superior human
civilisation, in which quantity ever tends to give place to quality, the
higher value of the individual involves an effort to avoid sacrifice
which sometimes proves worse than abortive. An avian philosopher
would be unlikely to feel called upon to denounce nests as the dark
places of the earth, and in laying down our human moral laws we have
always to be aware of forgetting the fundamental biological
relationship of parent and child to which all such moral laws must
conform. To some would-be parents that necessity may seem hard. In
such a case it is well for them to remember that there is no need to
become parents and that we live in an age when it is not difficult to
avoid becoming a parent. The world is not dying for lack of parents. On
the contrary we have far too many of them--ignorant parents, silly
parents, unwilling parents, undesirable parents--and those who aspire to
the high dignity of creating the future race, let them be as few as they
will--and perhaps at the present time the fewer the better--must not
refuse the responsibilities of that position, its pains as well as its joys.

In our human world, as we know, the moral duties laid upon us--the
duties in which, if we fail, we become outcasts in our own eyes or in
those of others or in both--are of three kinds: the duties to oneself, the
duties to the small circle of those we love, and the duties to the larger
circle of mankind to which ultimately we belong, since out of it we
proceed, and to it we owe all that we are. There are no maxims, there is
only an art and a difficult art, to harmonise duties which must often
conflict. We have to be true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. To
that extent George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver was undoubtedly right. But
the renunciation of the Self is not the routine solution of every conflict,
any more than is the absolute failure to renounce. In a certain sense the
duty towards the self comes before all others, because it is the
condition on which duties towards others possess any significance and
worth. In that sense, it is true according to the familiar saying of
Shakespeare,--though it was only Polonius, the man of maxims, who
voiced it,--that one cannot be true to others unless one is first true to
oneself, and that one can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy
to give unless one also knows how to take.
We see that the problem of the place of parents in life, after their
function of parenthood has been adequately fulfilled, a problem which
offers no difficulties among most forms of life, has been found hard to
solve by Man. At some places and periods it has been considered most
merciful to put them, to death; at others they have been almost or quite
deified and allowed to regulate the whole lives of their descendants.
Thus in New Caledonia aged parents, it is said by Mrs. Hadfield, were
formerly taken up to a high mountain and left with enough food to last
a few days; there was at the same time great regard for the aged, as also
among the Hottentots who asked: "Can you see a parent or a relative
shaking and freezing under a cold, dreary, heavy, useless old age, and
not think,