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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