this is the proper power of the magistrate, of which the father hath not
so much as the shadow. His command over his children is but temporary,
and reaches not their life or property: 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 their's; nor to their liberty
neither, when they are once arrived to the infranchisement of the years
of discretion. The father's empire then ceases, and he can from thence
forwards 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 license from divine
authority to leave father and mother, and cleave to his wife.
Sec. 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 the father
himself is free from subjection to the will of any body else, and they
are each 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; as he hath laid on them an
obligation to nourish, preserve, and bring up their offspring; so he has
laid on the children a perpetual obligation of honouring their parents,
which containing in it an inward esteem and reverence to be shewn by all
outward expressions, ties up the child from any thing that may ever
injure or affront, disturb or endanger, the happiness or life of those
from whom he received his; and engages him in all actions of defence,
relief, assistance and comfort of those, by whose means he entered into