Religious Education in the Family | Page 3

trained and sufficiently motived to live the
social life of good-will. The family exists to give society developed,
efficient children. It fails if it does not have a religious, a spiritual
product. It cannot succeed except by the willing self-devotion of adult
lives to this spiritual, personal purpose.
A family is the primary social organization for the elementary purpose
of breeding the species, nurturing and training the young. 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