It is but a help to
the weakness and imperfection of their nonage, a discipline
necessary to their education. And though a father may dispose of his
own possessions as he pleases when his children are out of danger of
perishing for want, yet his power extends not to the lives or goods
which either their own industry, or another's bounty, has made theirs,
nor to their liberty neither when they are once arrived to the
enfranchisement of the years of discretion. The father's empire then
ceases, and he can from thenceforward no more dispose of the liberty
of his son than that of any other man. And it must be far from an
absolute or perpetual jurisdiction from which a man may withdraw
himself, having licence from Divine authority to "leave father and
mother and cleave to his wife."
66. But though there be a time when a child comes to be as free from
subjection to the will and command of his father as he himself is free
from subjection to the will of anybody else, and they are both under
no other restraint but that which is common to them both, whether it
be the law of Nature or municipal law of their country, yet this
freedom exempts not a son from that honour which he ought, by the
law of God and Nature, to pay his parents, God having made the parents
instruments in His great design of continuing the race of mankind
and the occasions of life to their children.
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