Religious Education in the Family | Page 2

the clothes closet. Rather,
everything depends on whether the home and family are considered in
worthy and adequate terms.
Homes are wrecked because families refuse to take home-living in
religious terms, in social terms of sacrifice and service. In such homes,
organized and conducted to satisfy personal desires rather than to meet
social responsibilities, these desires become ends rather than agencies
and opportunities.
They who marry for lust are divorced for further lust. Selfishness, even
in its form of self-preservation, is an unstable foundation for a home. It
costs too much to maintain a home if you measure it by the personal
advantages of parents. What hope is there for useful and happy family
life if the newly wedded youth have both been educated in selfishness,
habituated to frivolous pleasures, and guided by ideals of success in
terms of garish display? Yet what definite program for any other
training does society provide? Do the schools and colleges, Sunday

schools and churches teach youth a better way? How else shall they be
trained to take the home and family in terms that will make for
happiness and usefulness? It is high time to take seriously the task of
educating people to religious efficiency in the home.
§ 2. THE RELIGIOUS MOTIVE
The family needs a religious motive. More potent for happiness than
courses in domestic economy will be training in sufficient domestic
motives. It will take much more than modern conveniences, bigger
apartments, or even better kitchens to make the new home. Essentially
the problem is not one of mechanics but of persons. What we call the
home problem is more truly a family problem. It centers in persons; the
solution awaits a race with new ideals, educated to live as more than
dust, for more than dirt, for personality rather than for possessions. We
need young people who establish homes, not simply because they feel
miserable when separated, nor because one needs a place in which to
board and the other needs a boarder, but because the largest duty and
joy of life is to enrich the world with other lives and to give themselves
in high love to making those other lives of the greatest possible worth
to the world.
The family must come to a recognition of social obligations. We all
hope for the coming ideal day. Everywhere men and women are
answering to higher ideals of life. But the new day waits for a new race.
Modern emphasis on the child is a part of present reaction from
materialism. New social ideals are personal. We seek a better world for
the sake of a higher race. The emphasis on child-welfare has a social
rather than a sentimental basis. The family is our great chance to
determine childhood and so to make the future. The child of today is
basic to the social welfare of tomorrow. He is our chance to pay to
tomorrow all that we owe to yesterday. The family as the child's
life-school is thus central to every social program and problem.
§ 3. WIDER CHILD-WELFARE
This age knows that man does not live by bread alone. Interest in
child-welfare is for the sake of the child himself, not for the sake of his

clothes or his physical condition. Concern about soap and sanitation,
hygiene and the conveniences of life grows because these all go to
make up the soil in which the person grows. There is danger that our
emphasis on child-welfare may be that of the tools instead of the man;
that we may become enmeshed in the mechanism of well-being and
lose sight of the being who should be well. To fail at the point of
character is to fail all along the line. And we fail altogether, no matter
how many bathtubs we give a child, how many playgrounds, medical
inspections, and inoculations, unless that child be in himself strong and
high-minded, loving truth, hating a lie, and habituated to live in
good-will with his fellows and with high ideals for the universe.
Modern interest in the material factors of life is on account of their
potency in making real selfhood; we acknowledge the importance of
the physical as the very soil in which life grows. But the fruits are more
than the soil, and a home exists for higher purposes than physical
conveniences; these are but its tools to its great end. Somehow for
purposes of social well-being we must raise our thinking of the family
to the aim of the development of efficient, rightly minded character.
The family must be seen as making spiritual persons.
§ 4. THE COST OF A FAMILY
Taking the home in religious terms will mean, then, conceiving it as an
institution with a religious purpose, namely, that of giving to the world
children who are adequately