In promoting parental sovereignty, Christianity acted from its own creedal imperatives, including a theology that harmonizes authentic liberty with objective morality. It was a theology in which personal decision contributes to our justification. Fifteen hundred years of debate have convinced most Christians that God made human consent a necessary, if insufficient, element of personal salvation. In that case, it is not only the pagans who are moral peers of the believer. And, if self-perfection is achieved, in part, by this honest quest for the correct answers, here is a vocation for which children at the age of reason are as fully equipped as any moral philosopher.
Children receive an adult share.
Our actual choices can have different effects in the subjective and external realms. The capacity for moral self-perfection thus is invulnerable to circumstance, but this does not justify social indifference to the form of the adult regime. The child is entitled to systematic subordination to that personal sovereignty which in the long run is most likely to yield a true picture of the objective moral order. Hence society must seek and secure it - whatever it is. Not all families agree about the details of the authentic good, nor all children with their parents.