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.

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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. We may improve it although we cannot improve on it.

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

adays we shall be reluctant to assume that it is speaking through legislatures or parliaments.

What then is the ethical basis for the State and its laws, for government and its authority? Can the Sense of Duty be a substitute for the old theory of divine sanction? Does it tell us to obey law and government? Can it give the State a right to exist? Or shall we be reduced to the mere principle of “expediency"? We may submit to the decrees of government in fear of a penalty threatening our lives or our freedom. Can any other stronger motive be found?

I regard this as a momentous problem. The change which has taken place in men's views on this subject, is akin to the change coming about during the last century in reference to the authority of Conscience. It looked for a time as if the new thought of the day had undermined the authority of the Sense of Duty. As yet society has only partially recovered from the shock of the change. It seemed for a time as if the only substitute for that higher inner law was the rule of expediency. Already, however, we are recovering to some extent from the blow which seemed to strike at the authority of Conscience. Erelong it will have a sanction in the minds of the people, in some ways firmer and more deeply rooted than when it was supposed to rest wholly on Supernatural Will.

And so I am inclined to think it will be with our beliefs about the Law of the State. Although it seems at first to be something on the outside, more and more we shall come to recognize that it too also has a sanction from the inside. Even when the Sense