father had not only simply power, but power monarchical, as he was father immediately from God,” O. 254. To the same purpose, the same law is cited by our author in several other places, and just after the same fashion; that is, “and mother,” as apocryphal words, are always left out; a great argument of our author’s ingenuity, and the goodness of his cause, which required in its defender zeal to a degree of warmth, able to warp the sacred rule of the word of God, to make it comply with his present occasion; a way of proceeding not unusual to those who embrace not truths because reason and revelation offer them, but espouse tenets and parties for ends different from truth, and then resolve at any rate to defend them; and so do with the words and sense of authors, they would fit to their purpose, just as Procrustes did with his guests, lop or stretch them, as may best fit them to the size of their notions; and they always prove like those so served, deformed, lame, and useless.
For had our author set down this command without garbling, as God gave it, and joined mother to father, every reader would have seen, that it had made directly against him; and that it was so far from establishing the “monarchical power of the father,” that it set up the mother equal with him, and enjoined nothing but was due in common to both father and mother: for that is the constant tenor of the scripture. “Honour thy father and thy mother, Exod. 20. He that smiteth his father or mother, shall surely be put to death, 21:15. He that curseth his father or mother, shall surely be put to death, ver. 17, repeated Lev. 20:9, and by our Saviour, Matt. 15:4. Ye shall fear every man his mother, and his father, Lev. 19:3. If any man have a rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother; then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and say, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice, Deut. 21:18–21. Cursed be he that setteth light by his father or his mother, 27:16. My son, hear the instructions of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother,” are the words of Solomon, a king who was not ignorant of what belonged to him as a father or a king; and yet he joins father and mother together, in