AN INTERPRETATION OF THE FAMILY
§ 1
. TAKING THE HOME IN RELIGIOUS TERMS
The ills of the modern home are symptomatic. Divorce, childless families, ir-
reverent children, and the decadence of the old type of separate home life are
signs of forgotten ideals, lost motives, and insufficient purposes. Where the
home is only an opportunity for self-indulgence, it easily becomes a cheap
boarding-house, a sleeping-shelf, an implement for social advantage. While
it is true that general economic developments have effected marked changes
in domestic economy, the happiness and efficiency of the family do not de-
pend wholly on the parlor, the kitchen, or the clothes closet. Rather, every-
thing 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 responsibili-
ties, these desires become ends rather than agencies and opportunities.
3 HENRY FREDERICK COPE
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 newlywed-
ded 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 bet-
ter 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 peoplewho 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
