Chapter III: Religion and the Family

ALL authorities and all thinking men are agreed on the paramount importance of the family for the public and private welfare of the people. If a man has a comfortable and happy home he need not care much as to how the world outside treats him. Outside his home he works for his living, but at home he lives. There he finds his truest and sweetest happiness. Still more does the welfare and happiness of future generations depend on the home. One of the first requisites for a happy and healthy life is to be well born. The human offspring must begin its life at home, it must be the fruit of the permanent union of a good and healthy man with a good and healthy woman. The long period of nurture of the human offspring requires still more peremptorily the bosom of the family. State-institution children will not do; they must have homes. It is in the home that the child receives its first physical, mental, and moral training. By the time that it is old enough to be sent to school the foundations of its character have been already laid. They may have been laid wisely or foolishly or simply haphazard, but in any case they have been laid, and future teachers can only build on what they find. The family is the unit of the true and natural constitution of society. The State, or society, is not an aggregate of individuals, but of families. It is for the State to regulate the external relations of the citizens with each other and with strangers for the common good; the less it has to do with the inner life of the family the better. A man's home should be his castle, impervious to the bailiff or to the policeman as long as he pays his way and keeps the law. Great inroads have been made on this old and sound principle since the time of the Reformation. Individualism came in then, but we are beginning to see now that individualism may be stretched a great deal too far. Man is above all a social animal, and the first society into which he is born and to which he owes his early nurture and training is the family. The separate members of the family have indeed their individual rights, but the less they think of them and the less they insist on them the happier and the better will the family life be, as a rule. Among other important lessons, the great lesson of unselfishness should be learnt in the bosom of the family. The family begins with the marriage of a man and a woman, and most modern investigators declare that history and social science proclaim that the union should be permanent and only cease with life. Monogamous and indissoluble marriage gives the best results, private and social; monogamous marriage constitutes the only type of the family that is worthy of the name. Thus the best modern social science agrees on this point with the teaching of Jesus Christ. On the celebrated occasion when Our Lord expounded that teaching, we read that His disciples observed: " If the case of a man with his wife be so, it is not expedient to marry." The Master accepted the observation as applicable to certain cases, but at the same time He taught that those who do not enter on a monogamous and indissoluble marriage must practise continence. The ancient pagan world refused to accept either alternative, and the modern Naturalist follows its example. One of the worst features of modern life is the lowering or total disruption of family life, and we are already beginning to reap the bitter fruits. The number of legal divorces is steadily on the increase. These are only a small proportion of the practical divorces in which married couples separate and often take other partners for a time. Cases of men and women living together without going through any marriage ceremony are only too common, and such temporary unions are dissolved as easily as they are contracted. Schools of powerful and popular writers unblushingly defend the practice. In spite of history, science, and common sense, they preach the doctrine that love is free and should be given free scope for its enjoyment. Experience proves that the enjoyment which results from broken vows and blighted homes is chequered with bitterness and short-lived, but what avails the experience of other people? Too many are bent on experimenting for themselves. It is here that the Christian religion comes in; it is precisely here that it has conferred some of its greatest blessings on mankind. Modern libertines protest that the Christian ideal is impossible. We can only answer that the history of two thousand years proves the contrary. Of course there have been bad Christians who broke the Christian laws of marriage and chastity, just as there have been bad Christians who broke other laws of Christian morality. Man's will is free; he can follow the light or not, as he pleases. The fact that some refuse to follow the light does not lessen the advantages it confers on those who are of good will and desire to follow it. The Divine Founder of Christianity knew fully what He was about while He lived on earth.

As Leo XIII. tells us: "Everyone knows that the happiness of public and private life depends on the family above everything else.... Hence it is that when the God of mercy had decreed the accomplishment of the redemption of mankind which the ages had long looked for, He so arranged its method and order that its first stages should show forth to the world a noble picture of a divinely constituted Family, in which all men might see the most perfect example of home life, of holiness, and of every virtue."* The divine and infinitely wise Founder of Christian society began His task by laying deep the foundations of the Christian home. He was engaged on that great task during those eighteen silent years that He spent at Nazareth. He did His work in His own way, in the most efficacious way for exerting a permanent influence on mankind. He first taught by His own example. He taught the immense and most important lesson of the simple Christian home by living the simple Christian life Himself in the bosom of the first Christian family. Later on, in keeping with His common practice, He explained by word of mouth what He had already taught by example. He explained to a corrupt and decadent society that the only marriage sanctioned by God and by nature was a life-long union between one man and one woman. He was fully conscious of the difficulty of the task that He had undertaken, but He knew that He was not demanding impossibilities. In asking men to lead a perfectly moral life, in asking them

* Brief, June 14, 1892.

to practise loving kindness to all men, even to enemies, He knew He was demanding more than human strength by itself could perform. But He had no idea of leaving men who followed Him to their merely human resources. He taught them to do their best and ask Him for help when they could do no more. He promised to help them generously, and He keeps His promise. And so He was not content with laying down the law—What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. He raised the natural union of man and woman to the dignity of a Sacrament. The union was to be something holy, something full of deep and hidden meaning, no less than a type of His own mystical union with His spouse, the Church, and it was to be a sacramental sign, the means of giving divine help to the souls of the newly wedded pair. They would have their difficulties, at times lawless human passion might tempt them to break their marriage vows, in process of time the merely natural passion of love might cool and evaporate, but for such moments of weakness especially, the Sacrament guaranteed them divine help to do their duty to the end. All this was not enough. Marriage is not a matter which only affects the private interests of the married couple. The welfare of human society is vitally interested in it as well. And so the Divine Founder of the Christian Church entrusted the governance of Christian marriage to His Church, both because marriage is the foundation of society and because Christian marriage is one of the seven Sacraments. The administration of those seven means of divine grace is specially committed to the Church. While the substance of the Christian law of marriage is of divine origin, the Church has received authority from her Founder to make suitable regulations to safeguard and defend it. Through the centuries she has faithfully discharged her office. During the period of the decadence of the old Roman society, while the new peoples were laying the foundations of modern States, during the Reformation when human passion again broke through all restraint, in the modern world of decay and corruption of Christian faith and Christian ideals, the Catholic Church has faithfully taught Christ's doctrine of marriage and of the home in spite of the opposition of human passion and of the powers of the world. She deserves our deepest gratitude for what she has done for the Christian home, to which we all owe more than can easily be said. Some sociologists have maintained that religion was the foundation of the family; it is at least one of its main props and supports.