A Well-Governed Family
Horace Bushnell. 1 Timothy 3:1-7 This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desires a good work.… When there is to be a real order and law in the house, it will come of no hard and boisterous or fretful and termagant way of command. Gentleness will speak the word of firmness, and firmness will be clothed in the airs of true gentleness. How many do we see who fairly rave in authority, and keep the tempest up from morning till night, who never stop to see whether anything they forbid or command is in fact observed! Indeed, they really forget what they have commanded. Their mandates follow so thickly as to crowd one another, and even to successively thrust one another out of remembrance. The result is, that by this cannonading of pop-guns, the successive pellets of command ment are in turn all blown away. If anything is fit to be forbidden or commanded, it is fit to be watched and held in faithful account. On this it is that the real emphasis of authority depends, not on the windstress of the utterance. Let there be only such and so many things commanded as can be faithfully attended to; these in a gentle and film voice, as if their title to obedience lay in their own merit; and then let the child be held to a perfectly inevitable and faithful account; and by that time it will be seen that order and law have a stress of their own, and a power to rule in their own divine right. The beauty of a well-governed family will be seen in this manner to be a kind of silent, natural-looking power, as if it were a matter only of growth, and could never have been otherwise. (Horace Bushnell.) Parallel Verses KJV: This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work. WEB: This is a faithful saying: if a man seeks the office of an overseer, he desires a good work.