Religious Education in the Family | Page 7

stage in social evolution--the compacting
of masses of persons together that out of the new fusing and welding
may arise new methods of social living. The larger numbers point to
more highly developed forms of social organization. When these larger
units discover their greater purposes, above factory and mill and store,
and realize them in personal values, the city life will be a more highly
developed mechanism for the higher life of man. The home life will
develop along with that city life.
§ 4. PURPOSEFUL ORGANIZATION
At present the home is suffering, just as the city is suffering, from a
lack of that purposeful organization which will order the parts aright

and subject the processes to the most important and ultimate purposes.
The city is simply an aggregation of persons, scarcely having any
conscious organization, thrown together for purposes 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.