Religious Education in the Family | Page 3

This is its physiological basis. But its duties cannot be discharged on the physiological plane alone. This elementary physiological function is lifted to a spiritual level by the aim of character and the motive of love. Families cannot be measured by their size; they must be measured by the character of their products. If quality counts anywhere it counts here, though it is well to remember that it takes some reasonable quantity to make right quality in each.
The family needs a religious motive. It demands sacrifice. To follow lower impulses is to invite disaster. The home breeds bitterness and sorrow wherever men and women court for lust, marry for social standing, and maintain an establishment only as a part of the game of social competition. To sow the winds of passion, ease, idle luxury, pride, and greed is to reap the whirlwind. Moreover, it is to miss the great chance of life, the chance to find that short cut to happiness which men call pain and suffering.
A family is humanity's great opportunity to walk the way of the cross. Mothers know that; some fathers know it; some children grow up to learn it. In homes where this is true, where all other aims are subordinated to this one of making the home count for high character, to training lives into right social adjustment and service, the primary emphasis is not on times and seasons for religion; religion is the life of that home, and in all its common living every child learns the way of the great Life of all. In vain do we torture children with adult religious penances, long prayers, and homilies, thinking thereby to give them religious training. The good man comes out of the good home, the home that is good in character, aim, and organization, not sporadically but permanently, the home where the religious spirit, the spirit of idealism, and the sense of the infinite and divine are diffused rather than injected. The inhuman, antisocial vampires, who suck their brothers' blood, whether they be called magnates or mob-leaders, grafters or gutter thieves, often learned to take life in terms of graft by the attitude and atmosphere of their homes.[1]
§ 5. MOTIVES FOR A STUDY OF THE FAMILY
The modern family is worthy of our careful study. It demands painstaking attention, both because of its immediate importance to human happiness and because of its potentiality for the future of society. The kind of home and the character of family life which will best serve the world and fulfil the will of God cannot be determined by sentiment or supposition. We are under the highest and sternest obligation to discover the laws of the family, those social laws which are determined by its nature and purpose, to find right standards for family life, to discriminate between the things that are permanent and those that are passing, between those we must conserve and those we must discard, to be prepared to fit children for the finer and higher type of family life that must come in the future.
Methods of securing family efficiency will not be discovered by accident. If it is worth while to study the minor details, such as baking cakes and sweeping floors, surely it is even more important to study the larger problems of organization and discipline. There is a science of home-direction and an art of family living; both must be learned with patient study.
It is a costly thing to keep a home where honor, the joy of love, and high ideals dwell ever. It costs time, pleasures, and so-called social advantages, as well as money and labor. It must cost thought, study, and investigation. It demands and deserves sacrifice; it is too sacred to be cheap. The building of a home is a work that endures to eternity, and that kind of work never was done with ease or without pain and loss and the investment of much time. Patient study of the problems of the family is a part of the price which all may pay.
No nobler social work, no deeper religious work, no higher educational work is done anywhere than that of the men and women, high or humble, who set themselves to the fitting of their children for life's business, equipping them with principles and habits upon which they may fall back in trying hours, and making of home the sweetest, strongest, holiest, happiest place on earth.
Heaven only knows the price that must be paid for that; heaven only knows the worth of that work. But if we are wise we shall each take up our work for our world where it lies nearest to us, in co-operation with parents, in service and sacrifice as parents or kin, our work in the shop where manhood is in the making, where it