CHAPTER III

I.References for StudyW. 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 ReadingJacob 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 Discussion1. 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. What steps should be taken to secure to the family a larger measure of the time in terms of occupation of the parents?6. What are the important things to contend for in this institution? Why should we expect change in the form of the home and what are the features which should not be changed?

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. What steps should be taken to secure to the family a larger measure of the time in terms of occupation of the parents?

6. What are the important things to contend for in this institution? Why should we expect change in the form of the home and what are the features which should not be changed?

2Figures taken from C. W. Votaw,Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the American Home, 1911.3A. J. Todd,Primitive Family and Education, p. 21. A most valuable and suggestive book.4Cited by Todd, p. 21.

2Figures taken from C. W. Votaw,Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the American Home, 1911.

3A. J. Todd,Primitive Family and Education, p. 21. A most valuable and suggestive book.

4Cited by Todd, p. 21.

The chief end of society is to improve the race, to develop the higher and steadily improving type of human beings. We can test the life of the family and determine the values of its elements by asking whether and in what degree they minister to this end, the growth of better persons. This is more than a theoretical aim or one conceived in a search for ideals. It is written plain in our passions and strongest inclinations. That which parents supremely desire for their children is that they may become strong in body, capable and alert in mind, and animated by worthy principles and ideals. The parent desires a good man, fit to take his place, do his work, make his contribution to the social well-being, able to live to the fulness of his powers, to take life in all its reaches of meaning and heights of vision and beauty. In true parenthood all hopes of success, of riches, fame, and ease, are seen but as avenues to this end, as means of making the finer character, of growing the ideal person. If we were compelled to choose for our children we should elect poverty, pain, disgrace, toil, and suffering if weknew this was the only highway to full manhood and womanhood, to completeness of character. Indeed, we do constantly so choose, knowing that they must endure hardness, bear the yoke in their youth, and learn that

Love and joy are torches litAt altar fires of sacrifice.

With this dominating purpose clearly in mind we are prepared to ask, What are the elements of family life which among the changes of today we need most carefully to preserve in order to maintain efficiency in character development? In days when the outer shell of domestic arrangements changes, when readjustments are being made in the organization of the family, what is there too precious to lose, so worthy and essential that we waste no time when seeking to maintain it?

The first great element to be preserved in all family life is that of the power of the small group for purposes of character development. The infant's earliest world is the mother's arms. In order to grow into a man fitted for the wider world of social living, he must learn to live in a world within his comprehension. A child's life moves through the widening circles of mother-care, family group, neighborhood, school, city, state,and nation into world-living. He must take the first steps before he is able to take the next ones. He must learn to live with the few as preparation for living with the many. In earliest infancy he takes his first unconscious lessons in the fine art of living with other folks as he relates himself to parents and to brothers and sisters.

Secondly, the family life affords the best agency for social training. The family is the ideal democracy into which the child-life is born. Here habits are formed, ideals are pictured, and life itself is interpreted. It is an ideal democracy, first, because it is a social organization existing for the sake of persons. The family comes nearer to fulfilling the true ideal of a democratic social order than does any other institution. It is founded to bring lives into this world; it is maintained for the sake of those lives; all its life, its methods, and standards are determined, ideally, by the needs of persons. It is an ideal democracy, secondly, because its guiding principle is that the greater lives must be devoted to the good of the lesser, the parent for the little child, the older members for the younger, in an attempt to extend to the very least the greatest good enjoyed by all. Thirdly, ideally it is a true democracy in that it gives to each member a share in its own affairs and develops the power to bear responsibilities and to carry each his own load in life. Thus the family groupis the best possible training for the life and work of the larger group, the state, and for world-living.5The maintenance of the ideals of the state, as a democracy, depends on the continuance of this institution with its peculiar power to train life in infancy and childhood for the life of manhood in the state. Such training can be given only in the smaller group that is governed by the motives peculiar to home and family life. The power to impress these principles depends on the size of the group. The small social organization, the family circle of from three members to even a dozen, bound by ties of affection, is the one great, efficient school, training youth to live in social terms.

Thirdly, the family sets spiritual values first. Our age especially needs men and women who think in terms of spiritual values, who rise above the measures of pounds and dollars and weigh life by personal qualities and worth. That is precisely what the home does. It prizes most highly the helpless, economically worthless infant; it measures every member by his personal character, his affectional worth. Its riches do not depend on that which money can buy, but on the personal qualities of love, goodness, kindness; on memories, associations, affection. The true home gives toevery child-life the power to choose the things of the world on the basis of their worth in personality. Only the mistaken judgments of later years, the short-minded wisdom of the world, make youth gradually lose the habit of preferring the home's spiritual benefits to the material rewards of the world of business. No life can be furnished for the strain of our modern materialism that lacks the basis of idealism furnished in the true family.

Fourthly, the power of family living to develop love as loyalty is to be noted. In this small group is laid the foundation of the moral life. "The family is the primer in the moral education of the race."6Here the new-born life begins to relate itself to other lives. Here it begins life in an atmosphere saturated by love, the central principle of all virtue, eventually loyalty to ideals in persons and devotion to them, "the greatest of these," because it is the parent of all virtue. The moral life, that life which is adjusted, capable, and adequately motived for helpful, efficient, enriching living with all other lives, is not a matter of rules, regulations, and restrictions.Neither is it a matter of separate habits as to this or the other kind of behavior, though this comes nearer to it than do rules and prescriptions. The character-life which parents desire for their children is not that which will do the right thing when it has discovered that right thing in some book of rules, nor that life which will do the right thing because society points that way, nor even that life which automatically does the right thing, but it is the life which, constantly moved by some high inner compulsion, some imperative of vision and ideal, moves to the highest possible plane of action in every situation. This is the life of loyalty. It begins with loyalty to persons, with that devotion which begins with affection. In no other place is this so well developed as in the relations of the family. This is the child's first and most potential school. Here the lessons are wholly unconscious; here they are strengthened by the pleasurable emotions. It is a joy to be loyal to those we love. Indeed, who can tell which comes first, the joy, the loyalty, or the love?

The power of this small social group of the family to develop the fundamental principle of loyalty, the root of all virtues, gives a position of great importance to the affections in the family. We do well to contend for the maintenance of conditions of family living which will strengthen theties of affection. If children could be thrust into the care of the state, in large groups, separated from parental care and oversight, it is difficult to see what emotional stimulus toward affection would remain. The personal devotion to intimate adults would in only the smallest degree compensate for the loss of father and mother. We know nothing of such devotion arising to any large degree in orphan asylums, still less in institutions under the cold and impersonal care of the state. It has been urged that the affections of parents stand in the way of a scientific regimen and education for small children. The cold, passionless, automatic parent, then, would be the ideal—a Mr. Dombey or a Mr. Feverel. Parents make many mistakes, but these mistakes are not due to too much affection, but to untrained minds and uneducated affections. It were better to save the values of their affections and on them to build a wise discipline for childhood by providing adequate training of parents for their duties.

Fifthly, there are some elements of the cost of family life, even its apparently unnecessary sacrifice and pain, that we do well to seek to keep. Character grows in paying the high price of maintaining a family. It is the most expensive form of living for adults. Marriages are now delayed because of the fear of the actual monetary cost; but far more serious is the cost in care, in nerves,in patience, in all the great elements of self-denial. No child ever knows what he has cost until he has children of his own. But this discipline of self-denial is that which saves us from selfishness. It is necessary to have some personal objects for which to give our lives if they are to be saved from centrifugation, from death through ingrowing affection. True, many bachelors and spinsters have learned the way of self-denying, fellow-serving love. But how can a true parent escape that lesson? Nor does it stop with parents; as children grow up together they, too, must learn mutual forbearance, conciliation, and, soon, the joy of service. One sees selfishness in the little child gradually fading in the practice of family service, helpfulness, consideration for others. The single child in a family misses something more important than playmates; he misses all the education of play and service. But who cannot remember many families that have grown to beauty of character under the discipline of home life, and especially when this has involved real sacrifices? The stories in the Pepper books illustrate the spirit that blossoms under the trials and hardships of the struggle of a family for a livelihood and for the maintenance of a home.

A clear function becomes evident for this social group called the family. It is that of dealing with young lives, in groups bound by ties of blood andsimilarity, for purposes of the development of personal character. The family has an essentially educational function. Bearing in mind that "educational" means the orderly development of the powers of the life, we can think of our families as existing for this purpose and to be tested by their ability to do this work, especially by their ability to develop persons, young lives, that have the power, the vision, the acquired habits and experience to live as more than animals. The family is an educational institution dealing with child-life for its full growth and its self-realization, especially on character levels. The educational function suggests the features of family life which we do well to seek to preserve. Many incidental forms may pass, but the essential human relations and experiences that go to develop life and character must be maintained at any cost.

I.References for StudyC. F. and C. B. Thwing,The Family, chap. vii. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.W. F. Lofthouse,Ethics and the Family, chaps. iv, v. Hodder & Stoughton, $2.50.II.Further Reading"The Improvement of Religious Education,"Proceedings of the Religious Education Association, I, 119-23. $0.50.Religious Education, April, 1911, VI, 1-48.S. P. Breckinridge and E. Abbott,The Delinquent Child and the Home. Russell Sage Foundation, $2.00.III.Topics for Discussion1. What is the chief end of all forms of social organization?2. What is in the last analysis the aim of every parent?3. What advantage has the family over the school and larger groups for educational purposes?4. In what sense is the family an ideal democracy?5. Show how the family sets spiritual values first.6. What in your judgment are the first evidences of character development? In what way do these come to the surface in the family? What is the factor of love in the development of character?7. Is that an ideal family in which none of the members bear pain or are called upon for self-denial? Can you see any especial advantage to character in the very difficulties and apparent disadvantages in the life of the family?

I.References for Study

C. F. and C. B. Thwing,The Family, chap. vii. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.

W. F. Lofthouse,Ethics and the Family, chaps. iv, v. Hodder & Stoughton, $2.50.

II.Further Reading

"The Improvement of Religious Education,"Proceedings of the Religious Education Association, I, 119-23. $0.50.

Religious Education, April, 1911, VI, 1-48.

S. P. Breckinridge and E. Abbott,The Delinquent Child and the Home. Russell Sage Foundation, $2.00.

III.Topics for Discussion

1. What is the chief end of all forms of social organization?

2. What is in the last analysis the aim of every parent?

3. What advantage has the family over the school and larger groups for educational purposes?

4. In what sense is the family an ideal democracy?

5. Show how the family sets spiritual values first.

6. What in your judgment are the first evidences of character development? In what way do these come to the surface in the family? What is the factor of love in the development of character?

7. Is that an ideal family in which none of the members bear pain or are called upon for self-denial? Can you see any especial advantage to character in the very difficulties and apparent disadvantages in the life of the family?

5See "Democracy in the Home,"American Journal of Sociology, January, 1912.6Francis G. Peabody,The Approach to the Social Question, p. 94.

5See "Democracy in the Home,"American Journal of Sociology, January, 1912.

6Francis G. Peabody,The Approach to the Social Question, p. 94.

The family is the most important religious institution in the life of today. It ranks in influence before the church. It has always held this place. Even among primitive peoples, where family life was an uncertain quantity, the relations of parents, or of one of the parents, to the children afforded the opportunity most frequently used for their instruction in tribal religious ideals and customs. We cannot generalize as to the practices of savage man in regard to family life, for those practices range from common promiscuous relationships, without apparent care for offspring, to a family unity and purity approaching the best we know; but this much is certain, that there was a common sense of responsibility for the training of young children in moral and religious ideas and customs, and that, in the degree that the family approached to separateness and unity, it accepted the primary responsibility for this task. The higher the type of family life the more fully does it discharge its function in the education of the child.7

It might be safe to say that among primitive peoples there were three stages, or types, of relationship based on the breeding of children, or three stages of development toward family life. The first is a loose and indefinite relationship existing principally between the adults, or the males and females, under which children born when not desired are neglected or strangled and, when acceptable, may be in the care of either parent, or of neither. Since the group, associated through infancy with at least one parent, is as yet undeveloped, any instruction will be individual and usually incidental.

The second form is that of a kind of family unity, either about the mother or the father, or both, or about a group of parents, in which the children live together and are sheltered and nurtured for their earlier years. Here, however, the real relationship of the child is to the tribe, the family is but his temporary guardian, and, at least by the age of puberty, he will be initiated into the tribal secrets. If he is a boy, he will cease to be a member of the family group and will go to live in the "men's house," becoming a part of the larger life of the tribe.8Such moral and religious instruction as he may acquire will come from the songs, traditions, and conversation which he hears as a child.

The third type approaches the modern ideal, with a greater or less degree of permanent unity between the two parents and with permanence in the group of the offspring. The parental responsibility continues for a greater length of time and, since the tribe makes smaller claims, and the parents live in the common domestic group, much more instruction is possible and is given. The tribal ideals, the traditions, observances, and religious rites are imparted to children gradually in their homes.

The last type brings us to the Hebrew conception of family life. It developed toward the Christian ideal. At first, polygamy was permitted; woman was the chattel of man and excluded from any part in the religious rites. But it included the ideal of monogamy in its tradition of the origin of the world, it denounced and punished adultery (Deut. 22: 22), and it gave especial attention to the training of the offspring. "And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart; and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up ... and thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thy house and upon thy gates" (Deut. 6: 6, 7, 9).

Much later, the messianic hope, the belief that in some Jewish family there should be born onedivinely commissioned and endowed to liberate Israel and to give the Jews world-sovereignty, operated to elevate the conception of motherhood and, through that, of the family. It made marriage desirable and children a blessing; it rendered motherhood sacred. It tended to center national hopes and religious ideals about the family.9

There are a few glimpses of ideal family life in the Old Testament. They are all summed up in the eloquent tribute to motherhood in the words of King Lemuel in the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs. It must be remembered, however, that such ideals did not belong to the Jews alone, that Plutarch shows many pictures of maternal fidelity and wifely devotion, that Greek and Roman history have their Cornelia, Iphigenia, and Mallonia.10

The Jews are an excellent example of the power of the family life to maintain distinct characteristics and to secure marked development. Practically throughout all the Christian era they have been a people without a land, a constitution, or a government, and yet never without race consciousness, national unity, and separateness. Their unity has continued in spite of dispersion, persecution, and losses; they have remained a race inthe face of political storms that have swept other peoples away. Their unity has continued about two great centers, the customs of religion and the life of the family.

The results of Jewish respect for family life can also be seen in the health of their own children. In 1910, for instance, among poor Jews in Manchester the mortality of infants under one year of age was found to be 118 per thousand; among poor Gentiles, 300 per thousand; and comparisons made some six years ago between Jewish and Gentile children in schools in the poorer parts of Manchester and Leeds (England) have shown that the Jewish children are uniformly taller, they weigh more, and their bones and teeth are superior.11

The Christian family is a type peculiar to itself, not as a new institution, for it has developed out of earlier race experience, but as controlled by a new interpretation, the spirit and conception of the home and family given in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. He did not give formal rules for the regulation of homes; rather he made a spiritual ideal of family life the basic thought of all his teaching. He said more about the family than concerning any other human institution, yet he established no family life of his own. He is called the founder of the church, yet he scarcely mentionsthat institution, while he frequently teaches concerning home duties and family relations. He glorifies the relations of the family by making them the figure by which men may understand the highest relations of life. He speaks more of fatherhood and sonship than of any other relations. He gives direction for living, using the family terms of brotherhood. He points forward to ideal living in a home beyond this life. He teaches men when they think of God and when they address him to take the family attitude and call him Father.

If we sum up all the teachings of Jesus and separate them from our preconceptions of their theological content, we cannot but be impressed with the facts that he seized upon the family life as the best expression of the highest relationships; that he pointed to a purified family life, in which spiritual aims would dominate, as the best expression of ideal relationships among his followers; and that he glorified marriage and really made the family the great, divine, sacramental institution of human society.

We can hardly overestimate the importance of such teaching to the character of the family. The early Christians not only accepted Jesus as their teacher and savior; they took their family life as the opportunity to show what the Kingdom of God, the ideal society, was like. Family life was consecrated. Men and women belonged to thenew order with their whole households. Religion became largely a family matter. The worship that had been confined to the temple now made an altar in every home and a holy of holies in the midst of every family. The scriptures that belonged to the synagogue now belonged in the home. Above all, this family existed for the purposes taught by Jesus, that men might grow in brotherhood toward the likeness of the divine Fatherhood. It was an institution, not for economic purpose of food and shelter, not for personal ends of passion or pride, but for spiritual purpose, for the growth of persons, especially the young in the home, in character, into "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

Christianity is essentially a religion of ideal family life. It conceives of human society, not in terms of a monarchy with a king and subjects, but in terms of a family with a great all-Father and his children, who live in brotherhood, who take life as their opportunity for those family joys of service and sacrifice. It hopes to solve the world's ills, not by external regulations, but by bringing all men into a new family life, a birth into this new family life with God, so securing a new personal environment, a new personality as the center and root of all social betterment. He who would come into this new social order must come into the divine family, must humble himselfand become as a little child, must know his Father and love his brothers.

Christianity, then, not only seeks an ideal family; it makes the family the ideal social institution and order. It makes family life holy, sacramental, religious in its very nature. This fact gives added importance to the preservation and development of the ideals of family life for the sake of their religious significance and influence. It not only makes religion a part of the life of the home but makes a religious purpose the very reason for the existence of the Christian type of home. It makes our homes essentially religious institutions, to be judged by religious products.

I.References for StudyG. A. Coe,Education in Religion and Morals, chap. xvi. Revell, $1.35.Article on "The Family," in Hastings,Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.II.Further ReadingOn the educational function of the family: A. J. Todd,The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency. Putnam, $2.00.On the religious place of the family: C. F. and C. B. Thwing,The Family. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.I. J. Peritz, "Biblical Ideal of the Home,"Religious Education, VI, 322.H. Hanson,The Function of the Family. American Baptist Publication Society, $0.15.W. Becker,Christian Education, or the Duties of Parents. Herder, $1.00. A striking presentation of the Roman Catholic view; could be read to advantage by all parents.III.Topics for Discussion1. What place did religion hold in the primitive family? What reference or allusion do we find in the Old Testament to the place of religion in the family (Deut. 6:7-9, 20-25)? What in the New Testament?2. What has been the effect of purity of family life on the Jewish race?3. What place did the family hold in the teachings of Jesus?4. What shall we think of the relations of the church and family as to their comparative rights and our duty to them?5. Do you agree that the family is the most important religious institution?

I.References for Study

G. A. Coe,Education in Religion and Morals, chap. xvi. Revell, $1.35.

Article on "The Family," in Hastings,Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.

II.Further Reading

On the educational function of the family: A. J. Todd,The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency. Putnam, $2.00.

On the religious place of the family: C. F. and C. B. Thwing,The Family. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.

I. J. Peritz, "Biblical Ideal of the Home,"Religious Education, VI, 322.

H. Hanson,The Function of the Family. American Baptist Publication Society, $0.15.

W. Becker,Christian Education, or the Duties of Parents. Herder, $1.00. A striking presentation of the Roman Catholic view; could be read to advantage by all parents.

III.Topics for Discussion

1. What place did religion hold in the primitive family? What reference or allusion do we find in the Old Testament to the place of religion in the family (Deut. 6:7-9, 20-25)? What in the New Testament?

2. What has been the effect of purity of family life on the Jewish race?

3. What place did the family hold in the teachings of Jesus?

4. What shall we think of the relations of the church and family as to their comparative rights and our duty to them?

5. Do you agree that the family is the most important religious institution?

7For a brief statement see Brinton,Religions of Primitive Peoples, Lecture 4, § 7; also Todd,The Family as an Educational Agency.8See Webster,Primitive Secret Societies, chaps. i, ii.9On the place of the family in different religious systems see the fine article under "Family" in Hastings,Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.10See Lecky,History of European Morals, chap. ii.11Quoted by Lofthouse inEthics and the Family, p. 8, from W. Hall, inProgress(London), April, 1907.

7For a brief statement see Brinton,Religions of Primitive Peoples, Lecture 4, § 7; also Todd,The Family as an Educational Agency.

8See Webster,Primitive Secret Societies, chaps. i, ii.

9On the place of the family in different religious systems see the fine article under "Family" in Hastings,Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.

10See Lecky,History of European Morals, chap. ii.

11Quoted by Lofthouse inEthics and the Family, p. 8, from W. Hall, inProgress(London), April, 1907.

With the brief statement of the history of the family and of its function in society which has already been given we are prepared to put together the two conclusions: first, that the family has an educational function, in that it exists as a social institution for the protection, nurture, development, and training of young lives, and, secondly, that it is a religious institution, the most influential and important of all religious institutions, whenever it realizes in any adequate degree its possibilities, because it is rooted in love and loyalty. It exists for personal and spiritual ideals and, in Christianity, it is inseparably connected with the teachings and the ideals of Jesus. It is educational in function and religious in character, so that it is essentially an institution for religious education. Religious education is not an occasional incident in its life; it is the very aim and dominating purpose of a high-minded family.

To make this the more clear we may need to clarify our minds as to certain popular conceptionsof education. Education means much more than instruction; religious education means much more than instruction in religion. Many habitually think of an educational institution as necessarily a place where pupils sit at desks and teachers preside over classes, the teachers imparting information which is to be memorized by the pupils, so that, from this point of view, a Sunday school would be almost the only institution for the religious education of children in existence, because it is the only one exclusively devoted to imparting instruction to children in specifically religious subjects. Such a view would limit religious education in the home to the formal teaching of the Bible and religious dogma by parents. The memorizing of scriptural passages and of the different catechisms once constituted a regular duty in almost all well-ordered homes. Today it is rarely attempted. Does that mean that religious education has ceased in the home?

But education means much more than instruction. Education is the whole process, of which instruction is only a part. Education is the orderly development of lives, according to scientific principles, into the fulness of their powers, the realization of all their possibilities, the joy of their world, the utmost rendering in efficiency of their service. It includes the training of powers of thought, feeling, willing, and doing; it includesthe development of abilities to discern, discriminate, choose, determine, feel, and do. It prepares the life for living with other lives; it prepares the whole of the life, developing the higher nature, the life of the spirit, for living in a spiritual universe.

Religious education, then, means much more than instruction in the literature, history, and philosophy of religion. It means the kind of directed development which regards the one who is developing as a religious person, which seeks to develop that one to fulness of religious powers and personality, and which uses, as means to that end, material of religious inspiration and significance and, indeed, regards all material in that light. Religious education seeks to direct a religious process of growth with a religious purpose for religious persons. Religious education is the spirit which characterizes the work of every educator who looks on the child as a spiritual nature, a religious person; it is the work of every educator who sees his aim as that of training this spiritual person to fulness of living in a society essentially spiritual.

In simplest possible terms, religious education means the training of persons to live the religious life and to do their work in the world as religious persons. It must mean, then, the development of character; it includes the aim, in the parents' minds, to bring their children up to the measureof the stature of the fulness of Christ. It is evident that this is a much greater task, and yet more natural and beautiful, than mere instruction in formal ideas or words in the Bible or in a catechism; that it is not and cannot be accomplished in some single period, some set hour, but is continuous, through all the days; that it pervades not only the spoken words, but the actions, organization, and the very atmosphere of the home.

Normal persons never stop growing. Just as children grow all the time in their bodies, so do adults and all others grow all the time in mind and will and powers of the higher life whenever they live normally. We grow spiritually, not only in church and under the stimulus of song and prayer, but we grow when the beauty of the woods appeals to us, when the face lightens at the face of a friend, when we meet and master a temptation, when we brace up under a load, when we do faithfully the dreary, daily task, when we adjust our thoughts in sympathy to others, when we move in the crowd, when we think by ourselves. The educational process is continuous. The children in the home are being moved, stimulated, every instant, and they are being changed in minute but nevertheless real and important degrees by eachimpression. There is never a moment in which their character is not being developed either for good or for ill. Religious education—that is, the development of their lives as religious persons—goes on all the time in the home, and it is either for good or for ill.

Next to the idea of the continuous and all-pervasive character of this process of religious development the most important thought for us is that religious education in the home may be determined by ourselves. This continuous, fateful process is not a blind, resistless one. It is our duty to direct it. It is possible for wise parents to determine the characters of their children. We must not forget this. It cannot be too strongly insisted on. The development of life is under law. This is an orderly world. Things do not just happen in it. We believe in a law that determines the type of a cabbage, the character of a weed. Do we believe that this universe is so ordered that there is a law for weeds and none for the higher life of man? Do we hold that cabbages grow by law but character comes by chance? If there is a law we may find it and must obey it. If we may know how to develop character, with as great certainty as we know how to do our daily work, will not this be our highest task, our greatest joy, the supreme thing to do in life?

This is the first great obligation of parents and of those who are willing to accept the joys and responsibilities of parenthood. We have no right to bring into this world lives with all the possibilities that a religious nature involves unless we know how to develop those lives for the best and from the worst. When we picture what a little child may become, from the vile, depraved, despoiling beast or the despicable, sneaking hypocrite on one extreme, to the upright, God-loving, man-serving man or woman with the love of purity, honor, truth, and goodness speaking through the life, we may well pause, realizing we need more than a sentimental desire that the child may reach the heights of goodness: we must know the way there and the methods of leading the life in that way. True devotion to God and to childhood will mean more than petitions for the salvation of children; it will mean the prayer that is labor and the labor that is prayer to know how they may attain fulness of spiritual life; it will mean reverent searching into the divine ways of growth in grace. The study of the means and methods of religious education, especially of children, in the home and family, is one of the most evident and important religious duties resting on parents and all who contemplate marriage and family life.

In discussing the development of character in children one hears often the question, "Which is the earliest virtue to appear in a child?" People will debate whether it is truthfulness, reverence, kindness, or some other virtue. All this implies a picture of the child as a tree that sends forth shoots of separate virtues one after another. But the character desired is not a series of branches, it is rather like a symmetrical tree; it is not certain parts, but it is the whole of a personality. The development of religious character is not a matter of consciously separable virtues, but is the determination of the trend and quality of the whole life. Moral training is not a matter of cultivating honesty today, purity tomorrow, and kindness the day after. Virtues have no separate value. Character cannot be disintegrated into a list of independent qualities. We seek a life that, as a whole life, loves and follows truth, goodness, and service.

But it is wise to inquire as to those manifestations of a pure and spiritual life which will earliest appear. One does not need to look far for the answer. Children are always affectionate; they manifest the possibilities of love. True, thisaffection is rooted in physiological experience, based on relations to the mother and on daily propinquity to the rest of the family, but it is that which may be colored by devotion, elevated by unselfish service, and may become the first great, ideal loyalty of the child's life. Little boys will fight and girls will quarrel more readily over the question of the merits of their respective parents than over any other issue. Almost as soon as a child can talk he boasts of the valor of his father, the beauty of his mother. Here is loyalty at work. He stands for them; he resents the least doubt as to their superiority, not because they give him food and shelter, but because they are his, because to him they are worthy; in all things they have the worth, the highest good; they are, in person, the virtue of life. Therefore in fighting for the reputation of his parents he is practicing loyalty to an ideal.

The principle of loyalty is the life-force of virtue; it is like the power that sends the tree toward the heavens, the upthrust of life. It may be cultivated in a thousand ways. Provided there is the outreach and upreach of loyalty within and that there is furnished without the worthy object, ideal, and aim, the life will grow upward and increase in character, beauty, and strength.

Next to the affectionate idealization of parents and home-folk one of the earliest manifestationsof the spirit of loyalty in the child is his desire to have a share in the activities of the home. He would not only look like those he admires; he would do what they do. This is more than mere imitation; it is loyalty at work again. The direction of this tendency is one of the largest opportunities before parents and can make the most important contribution to character.

The religious life of the child is essentially a matter of loyalty. His faith, affections, aspirations, and endeavors turn toward persons, institutions, and concepts which are to him ideal. He does not analyze, he cannot describe, or even narrate, his religious experiences, but he affectionately moves, with a sense of pleasure, toward those things which seem to him ideal, toward parents, customs of the home or school, the church, his class, his teacher, toward characters in story-books. He is likely to think of Jesus in just that way, as the one person whom he would most of all like to know and be with. The life of virtue and the religious life then will be weak or strong in the measure that the child has the stimulating ideals which call forth his loyalty and in the measure that he has opportunity to express that loyalty. His religious life will consist, not so much in external forms perhaps, still less in intellectual statements about theology or even about his own experiences, as in a growing realization of the greatideals, an increasing sense of their meaning and reality within, and, on the objective side, a steady moving of his life toward them in action and habits and therefore in character and quality.

It is worth while to insist upon two important considerations. Parents who stand as gardeners watching the growth of the tender plant of child-character may be looking for developments that never ought to come and will be disappointed because they were looking for the wrong thing. First, in watching for the beginnings of the religious life of the child in the family we are not expecting some new addition to the life, but rather the development of this whole life as a unity in a definite direction which we call religious. It is the first and most important consideration that religious education is not something added to the life as an extra subject of interest, but the development of the whole life into religious character and usefulness. Secondly, this growth of religious character is going on all the time. It is not separable into pious periods; it is a part of the very life of the family. Perhaps this increases the difficulty of our task, for it removes it from the realm of the mechanical, from that which is easily apprehended and estimated. It takes the task of the religious education of children out of the statisticalinto the vital, and reminds us that we are growing life every second, that there is never a moment when religious education is not in operation. This demands a consideration, not alone of lessons, of periods of worship and instruction, but of every influence, activity, and agency in all the family life that in any way affects the thinking, feeling, and action of the child. We are thinking of something more important than organizing instruction and exercises in religion in the home; we are thinking of organizing the family life for religious purposes, for the purpose of growing lives into their spiritual fulness.

Perhaps the capital mistake in the religious education of the family is that we overemphasize this or the other method and mechanism instead of bending every effort to secure a real religious atmosphere and soil in which young souls can really grow while we leave the process of growth more largely to the great husbandman. And the second great mistake is that we are looking for mechanical evidence of a religious life instead of for the development of a whole person. We must reinterpret the family to ourselves and see it as the one great opportunity life affords us to grow other lives and to bring them to spiritual fulness by providing a social atmosphere of the spirit and a constant, normal presentation of social living in spiritual terms.

When parents conceive the family in these terms and so organize the life of the home, the child becomes conscious of the fact, and at once the life of the family furnishes him with his first, his nearest, and most satisfactory appeal to loyalty. He feels that which he cannot analyze or express, the spiritual beauty and loyalty of family life. That life furnishes a soil and atmosphere for his soul. It is an atmosphere made of many elements: the primary and dominating purpose of parents and older persons, the habitual life of service and love, the consciousness of the reality of the Divine Presence, the fragrance of chastened character and experience, the customs of worship and affections. These things are not easily created, they cannot be readily defined, nor can directions be given in a facile manner for their cultivation. They are the elements most difficult to describe, hardest of all to secure when lacking, least easily labeled, not to be purchased ready-made, and yet without them religious education is wholly impossible in the family. Without this immediate appeal to loyalty the loyalties of the child toward higher and divine aims do not develop early; they are retarded and often remain dormant. For us all scarcely any more important question can be presented than this: What appeals to spiritual idealism and loyalty does our family life present to thechild? What quickening of love for goodness and purity, truth and service, is there in the home and its conduct?

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