Religious Education in the Family. Henry Frederick Cope
of industry. It will before very long organize itself for purposes of personal welfare and education. The family is usually a group bound in ties of struggle for shelter, food, and pleasure. Such consciousness as it possesses is that of being helplessly at the mercy of conflicting economic forces. The adjustment of those forces, their subjection to man's higher interests, must come in the future and will help the family to freedom to discover its true purpose.
It is easy to insist on the responsibility of parents for the character-training of their children, but it is difficult to see how that responsibility can be properly discharged under industrial conditions that take both father and mother out of the home the whole day and leave them too weary to stay awake in the evening, too poor to furnish decent conditions of living, and too apathetic under the dull monotony of labor to care for life's finer interests. The welfare of the family is tied up with the welfare of the race; if progress can be secured in one part progress in the whole ensues.
There are those who raise the question whether family life is a permanent form of social organization for which we may wisely contend, or is but a phase from which the race is now emerging. Some see signs that the ties of marriage will be but temporary, that children will be born, not into families but into the life of the state, bearing only their mothers' names and knowing no brothers and sisters save in the brotherhood of the state. Whether the permanent elements in family life furnish a sufficiently worthy basis for its preservation is a subject for careful consideration.
§ 5. THE HOME AND THE FAMILY
The family is more important than the home, just as the man is more than his clothing. The form of the home changes; the life of the family continues unchanged in its essential characteristics. The family causes the home to be. Professor Arthur J. Todd insists that the family is the basis of marriage, rather than marriage the cause of the family.3 Small groups for protection and social living would precede formal arrangements of monogamy. Westermarck concludes that it was "for the benefit of the young that male and female continued to live together."4 The importance of this consideration for us lies in the thought of the overshadowing importance of this social group which we now call the family. The family is the primary cell of society, the first unit in social organization. Our thought must balance itself between the importance of this social group, to be preserved in its integrity, and the value of the home, with its varied forms of activity and ministry, as a means of preserving and developing this group, the family.
One hears today many pessimistic utterances regarding the modern home. Some even tell us that it is doomed to become extinct. Without doubt great economic changes in society are producing profound changes in the organization and character of the home. But the home has always been subject to such changes; the factor which we need to watch with greater care is the family; the former is but the shell of the latter.
The character of each home will depend largely on the economic condition of those who dwell in it. The homes of every age will reflect the social conditions of that age. The picture in historical romances of the home of the mediaeval period, where the factory, or shop, joined the dining-room, where the apprentices ate and roomed in the home, where one might be compelled to furnish and provision his home literally as his castle for defense, presents a marked difference to the home of this century tending to syndicate all its labors with all the other homes of the community. Since the home is simply the organization and mechanism of the family life, it is most susceptible to material and social changes. It varies as do the fashions of men.
Much that we assume to be detrimental to the life of the home is simply due to the fact that in the evolution of society the family, as it were, puts on a new suit of clothes, adopts new forms of organization to meet the changing external conditions.
§ 6. THE HOME CHANGING; THE FAMILY ABIDING
The home is of importance only as a tool, a means to the final ends of the family life; the test of its efficiency is not whether it maintains traditional forms but whether it best serves the highest aims of family life. We may abandon all the older customs; our regret for them, as we look back on the days of home cooking, cannot be any greater than the regrets of our parents or grandparents looking back on the spinning-wheel and the hand loom that cumbered the kitchen of their childhood. Surely no one contends that family life has deteriorated, that human character is one whit the poorer, because we have discarded the family spinning-wheel. Through the changes of a developing civilization, as man has moved from the time when each one built his own house, worked with his own tools to make all his supplies, to these days of specialized service in community living, the home has changed with each step of industrial progress, but the family has remained practically unchanged.
The family stands a practically unchanging factor of personal qualities at the center of our civilization; the family rather than the home determines the character of the coming days. In its social relationships are rooted the things that are best in all our lives. In its social training lie the solutions of more problems in social adjustment and development than we are willing to admit. The family is the soil of society, central to all its problems and possibilities.
Before church or school the family stands potent for character. We are what we are, not by the ideals held before us for thirty minutes a week or once a month in a church, nor by the instructions given in the classroom; we are what parents, kin, and all the circumstances that have touched us daily and hourly for years have determined we should be.
The sweetest memories of our lives cluster about the scenes of family life. The rose-embowered cottage of the poet is not the only spot that claims affectionate gratitude; many look back to a city house wedged into its monotonous row. But, wherever it might be, if it sheltered love and held a shrine where the altar fires of family sacrifice burned, earth has no fairer or more sacred spot. The people rather than the place made it potent.
Stronger even than the memories that remain are the marks of habits, tendencies, tastes, and dispositions there acquired. Many a man who has left no fortune worth recording to his sons has left them something better, the aptitude for things good and honorable, the memory of a good name, and the heritage of a life that was worthy of honor. The personal life has been always the enduring thing. Our concern for the future should be not whether we can pass on intact the forms of home organization, but whether we can give to the next day the force of ideal family life. Perhaps like Mary we would do well to turn our eyes from the much serving, the mechanisms of the home, to set our minds on the better part, the personal values in the association of lives in the family.
I. References for Study
W. F. Lofthouse, Ethics and the Family, chaps. ii, xi, xii. Hodder & Stoughton, $2.50.
Charles R. Henderson, Social Duties from the Christian Point of View, chaps. ii, iii. The University of Chicago Press, $1.25.
C. W. Votaw, Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the American Home. Religious Education Association, $0.25.
II. Further Reading
Jacob A. Riis, Peril and Preservation of the Home. Jacobs, Philadelphia, Pa., $1.00.
Charles R. Henderson, Social Elements. Scribner, $1.50.
Charles F. Thwing, The Recovery of the Home. American Baptist Publication Society, $0.15.
III. Topics for Discussion
1. The tendency toward community life illustrated in the schools, amusement parks, and hotel life. Remembering the ultimate purpose of the family, how far is communal life desirable?
2. Does the apartment or tenement building furnish a suitable condition for the higher purposes of the family?
3. Is it possible to restore to the home some of the benefits lost by present factory consolidation of industry?
4. What can take the place of the old household arts and of those which are now passing?
5.