Filial Duty.
It was the commandment of the Eternal God himself, delivered amid the lightnings and thunders of the holy mountain, “Honour thy father and mother;” and there was no reservation found upon the tablet of stone. Man may persecute, sickness may change, grief may depress, poverty may chill, or grief may blacken the heart of the parent, but the bonds of the child are never loosened.
The affection of a child for a parent, in its strongest degree does not amount to a hundredth part of that which a parent feels for a child; and it is not until the child becomes a parent, that he is aware of this. If the voice of infancy should ever call you “Mother,” you will then know (but never till then) how hard, how impossible it is to dry up the fountain of a parent’s love, or teach the trunk to shake off and cast from it the blossoms which thence derive their being.