you sow, so shall you reap. If you sow in neglect, you will reap calamity. You have made a vow. It is registered beyond all recall. If you break it, nature will exact the penalty. You are not to think about yourself in keeping it. You are only to have one fact before you, and that is the responsibility for this child's life.

Commonly it is said that we should preserve the Family for the sake of the child. I should rather say sake of its influence It is doubtful even

that we should preserve it for the on the mature man and woman. yet, whether mankind has begun to appreciate all the possibilities of home life. We are in a transitional age, with a little of life in the world, a little national life, a little community life, and a little home life. Not until the coming centuries will the human race see these various phases distinct and individualized so that each may accomplish its full purpose.

From the side of personal satisfaction the grandeur of the home is that it is one's "castle." It is the place where a man can retire from the world, retreat from the gaze of others and be to some extent shut off from intrusion. When once in this castle, he can close the gates and then "just be himself." Out in the world he can never quite be himself, but will always be adjusting his acts and countenance to the gaze of others. The real self is free only within the sanctuary of the home.

The Family is a far more ideal retreat from the world than the hermit's cell. You do not want to get away from everybody, in order to be yourself. If you make that effort and accomplish it, your best self may not appear at all. But what you crave for is a centre, a den or a castle where the people with whom

you are associated, know you and believe in you, and where your natural self is respected. As a real fact, it is only among those with whom we have been intimate for a great while, if not all our lives, that we can be our natural selves. We are conscious that such persons know us, that there is no use or need of posing in their presence. We are known to them from the inside, as far as we can be known in that way at all.

The pressure of commercial or public life nowadays deprives many a man of this opportunity. He knows little of the privileges of his own "castle." The "self within himself" has had no free play. He becomes a congeries of selves, according to the variety of relationships into which he is thrown in public life. All this will change by and by and as civilization advances, and the existence of the home more and more takes on its true aspect or character.

I have no anxiety over a possible "decline of the Family." The institution is destined to survive, because civilization depends upon it. Because it is a refining force for which there is no substitute, therefore it is securely established. Those nations and those races which preserve the most perfect home life, will triumph, and the other races will gradually die away.

No doubt, schemes of change will be proposed again and again in future times, as in the past they have been offered by deep and honest thinkers from Plato down to our own times. Now and then the plans may be tried. Children may be taken from the home and grouped together in large families constructed on some fanciful idea; educated on some

new plan, and thrown out into the world to show the possibilities of the new type. But such children will be imperfectly developed specimens of the human race and will be obliged to retire before the superior examples developed through the home life. The peculiar individuality among the young which genuine family life calls forth, on the one hand, and the refining, softening influence on the mature exerted by the relationship between the strong and the weak, - these of themselves are both so important in developing race civilization, that the family life which is the nursery for them is sure to triumph in the end.

That is what we mean when we say that an institution is rooted in the Nature of Things. When we assume that the germs of family life lie back in prehistoric ages, we do not necessarily imply that it was a prehistoric institution. The old, old habit of seeing a social ideal as having a concrete existence at the time of the first appearance of the human race on the earth, belongs now to the recognized class of "illusions." But the new doctrine of evolution which illumines for us the significance of those ideals, shows us that what we are tending toward grows out of the condition of the human race at the beginning.

If you undertake to introduce some new scheme or system, you may try it for a time. But it will not be perpetuated. It will seem as if a voice said to you: "Step aside, your plan is not wanted." You cannot overthrow an institution which has been developing for hundreds of thousands of years. You must work along the line suggested by Nature if you expect to accomplish anything at all.

This, I believe, is the task which Ethical Idealism

will have before it. We need to make it plain, just as with the marriage relationship, that family life as an institution is rooted in the Nature of Things and not simply dependent on a possibly arbitrary divine sanction. On the other hand, the sanction is truly divine in so far as all institutions of nature take us back to the original or ultimate source to which in certain moods we give the name Deity. But the institution is now once for all established. improve it although we cannot improve on it.

We may

Instead of debating as to the perpetuity of the institution itself, what we need to do is to study all its grand possibilities. Ethics can improve it but suggest no true substitute for it.

XIII

LAW AND GOVERNMENT, AND WHY

WE SHOULD REVERE THEM

I PUT to myself the question, Why do I believe in law and government, in the State and its authority? Whence comes the sanction for the law of the State; why should I obey it if I am disposed to defy it? What right has government to lay a command upon me or to forbid my doing anything that I please? I may submit because I must, or because there is a threat attached to the command. It may be only a choice of evils on my part. But had I the opportunity of acting in defiance of government, and yet of escaping any penalty for disobedience, what then should interfere?

It may be impossible for us any longer to assume that the State exists directly by the will of God, or that the law of the State is a divine law. We may no longer be able to associate with the decrees of government a supernatural sanction. All such notions have changed under the influence of the New Enlightenment. Whatever we may believe about deity, the conviction more and more prevails that the voice of government is the voice of man, that law, as we now understand it, is a human institution.

In whatever way divine authority may speak, now