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 Paean, 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.
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