Ulbat Christianity fia$ Done for 
 
 the family. 
 
 0 
 
 By Rev. Samuel W. Dike, LL.D., 
 
 Secretary of the National Divorce Reform League. 
 
 Y article will not be devoted 
 to those paeans of praise that 
 are commonly sung on the 
 subject before us. But this 
 will not be because there 
 of the marvelous transforma- 
 Christianity has wrought in 
 the family as a social institution, though I 
 think more than its just due has sometimes 
 been given it. I do not see how it is pos¬ 
 sible for a candid reader to compare the 
 domestic life of the Roman world of the 
 first Christian centuries with that of the 
 early Christians, especially as the teachings 
 of the latter disclose their ideals, and not 
 feel that here is one of the great triumphs 
 of the Founder of Christianity. I some¬ 
 times think, after considerable study of the 
 historic and present place of the family in 
 human society, as sociology sets it before 
 us in the new light, that there is enough in 
 the short utterances of Christ regarding the 
 family to put him at the head of all think¬ 
 ers on social themes, without reference to 
 anything else that he ever said or did. 
 
 is any doubt 
 tions which 
 
But what did he do ? How did he do 
 it ? Then, what has the Christianity 
 which he inspired done as a consequence 
 of what its Founder said about the family ? 
 And in what way has this been accom¬ 
 plished ? These are the questions I care 
 most to have answered. It would be easy 
 enough to fill my allotted space with the 
 usual story of the early and modern tri¬ 
 umphs of Christianity in behalf of the 
 family ; but no recital, however eloquent, 
 of the mere effects by themselves, or in 
 contrast with that which they displaced, 
 can best tell the story of a work planned 
 for the entire future of human society. 
 We must get back to the ideal, note the 
 way in which it has been used so far, and 
 thus try to see the lines along which the 
 future will carry the work. In this way 
 we also discover more clearly the real 
 grandeur of the structure. The completed 
 plan of the cathedral means more than the 
 finished part can tell us by looking at that 
 alone. 
 
 mat Tt Did not Do. 
 
 Now, neither early Christianity nor its 
 historic Founder created the monogamous 
 family which we know so well. For, 
 perhaps, the Western world never saw this 
 type of the family in more vigorous form, 
 so far as the essentials of its structure go, 
 than among the early Mediterranean 
 peoples. It was based on the union of 
 one man and one woman for life. Religion 
 
was its bond and inspiration, "making its 
 common meal a sacred rite, establishing a 
 domestic altar, and consecrating the hearth 
 and family tomb. Property inhered in the 
 family rather than in the individual. In a 
 word, the entire life was rooted in the 
 home. Not even the Hebrew family, in 
 its best days, was nearer an ideal for the 
 times in structure and form, or better 
 adapted to a pure and vigorous domestic 
 life, than this old Roman institution. The 
 superior vitality of the Hebrew household 
 lay chiefly in the unity and universality of 
 its theistic idea. Rome could not make 
 the transition, as its civilization developed, 
 from a god for each household to one God 
 for all the people, in the nation and the 
 home alike, and so religion lost its power 
 to sustain both. But after due allowance 
 for the exaggeration of the critics and his¬ 
 torians regarding early Roman and Germanic 
 domestic life, I think we must not only 
 concede so much to the natural strength 
 and vigor of the domestic structure of the 
 early Roman world, but admit that probably 
 something of it continued down to the 
 time of early Christianity, and sometimes 
 became, perhaps more frequently than we 
 have believed, the matrix of the new faith. 
 
 Now Christ simply pointed back through 
 the earliest Jewish history or tradition, as 
 the case may be, to the constitutional pro¬ 
 visions of nature herself. You must, he 
 said, for substance, go behind the Mosaic 
 
 3 
 
legislation, useful as it was for the times, 
 and look into nature. Here, in the physi¬ 
 cal constitution of the sexes, in the conse¬ 
 quent demand for an exclusive affection of 
 two souls for each other, and in the unity 
 that grows out of the relation, I bid you 
 find the great constructive lines of the true 
 family, and under the power of Him who 
 thus made things, apply this principle to 
 the solution of your practical difficulties 
 about marriage and divorce. He seemed 
 merely to answer a question about divorce, 
 but, as usual in his answers, did much 
 more ; for he pointed out the constituent 
 elements of the true family, beyond which 
 science will not ever go. 
 
 early neglect 
 
 But the Christian Church has tacitly 
 assumed that her Founder gave us only a 
 doctrine of marriage and divorce. She has 
 held, too, in some of her organizations, 
 that this was to be incorporated into her 
 canons and forced upon the legislation of 
 the State. Less widely the Church has 
 been content to keep her own ecclesiastical 
 law and practice up to the standard of the 
 Gospels, while, in the language of Presi¬ 
 dent Woolsey, she virtually has said, “ Law, 
 a patchwork of expedients, needs not to 
 conform to the true conception of human 
 relations.” And a portion of the Christian 
 world has either questioned both of these 
 stricter applications of the ideal of Christ, 
 
 4 
 
or held the ideal to be only a goal to be 
 striven towards rather than a measure to be 
 applied, either in the rules of political 
 order or the discipline of ecclesiastical 
 organizations. Christianity has so far failed 
 to unite in maintaining any one of these 
 theories to the exclusion of the others. 
 The practice of the Church is accordingly 
 widely variant. 
 
 The method pursued by the Church in 
 the application of the principles of her 
 Founder needs furthur elucidation. So far 
 as I can learn, the early Christians did not 
 concern themselves about the family as an 
 institution. The family does not seem to 
 have been taken as their point of view in 
 looking at the many and urgent practical 
 domestic questions that were continually 
 forced upon them. Their inquiries almost 
 invariably took another direction. They 
 generally simply asked. How shall we con¬ 
 duct ourselves in this or that relation which 
 we hold through marriage with one another 
 or with unbelievers— heathen, as we mod¬ 
 ern people often call all such ? In other 
 words, theirs was the practical problem of 
 individual relationships, with no clear con¬ 
 sciousness of a social institution underneath 
 and including them all. 
 
 To the student of the structure and 
 growth of societies this attitude toward the 
 subject is easily explained. A new religion, 
 and that always in proportion to its radical 
 difference in principles from the old faiths 
 
 5 
 
of a people, is necessarily individualistic in 
 its early work, especially when it meets an 
 advanced civilization. For at first it, of 
 necessity, picks its converts out from the old 
 faiths one by one. It often necessarily sets 
 the members of a household at variance with 
 each other. Only in case of a strong soli¬ 
 darity in domestic or economic life can it 
 transfer men by families and groups to the 
 new faith. Mormonism, Christian missions 
 in foreign countries, and the old society of 
 the India of to-day afford many illustrations 
 of this sociological fact. That Christianity 
 appeals strongly to the individual as such is 
 true. But the sociological principle to which 
 I refer is also a powerful factor in making 
 this its actual method. In the light of social 
 science we are able to give the fact its fuller 
 explanation, and thus point with real intel¬ 
 ligence to the actual work Christianity has 
 done for the family, find its true value, and 
 then see how the future part of it must go 
 on. 
 
 Lecky calls attention to the remark of 
 Milman concerning the early Church, that 
 “ rarely, if ever, in the discussions of the 
 comparative merits of marriage and celibacy, 
 the social advantages appear to have occurred 
 to the mind. . . . It is always argued with 
 relation to the interests and perfections of 
 the individual soul.” An examination of 
 the writings of the Ante-Nicene Fathers also 
 fails to discover any considerable reference 
 to the family as a social institution in their 
 
 6 
 
treatment of the problems of domestic mo¬ 
 rality. As Milman said of marriage, it was 
 always the individual and the duties of indi¬ 
 viduals that were put to the front. 
 
 This statement seems to hold good of the 
 family and of the canon law of the Western 
 Church regarding the family in relation to 
 marriage and divorce, and probably it is also 
 true of the ecclesiastical regulations of most 
 Protestant bodies. Literature treating di¬ 
 rectly of the family is very meagre. When 
 I began to investigate the subject, some 
 twenty years ago, I was startled at my ina¬ 
 bility then to find a single book in the Eng¬ 
 lish language — save one on the Patriarchal 
 Family, and that was of no scientific value — 
 with the simple title. The Family. The 
 subject was almost as rare as the title. 
 None among the many books on marriage 
 and divorce at that time approached these 
 subjects with any recognition of them as 
 only chapters in the science, law, or ethcis of 
 the family. The word family ” was rarely 
 used in anv of them. In fine, the family is 
 one of the newest problems in the thought 
 of the Christian Church and in science. 
 
 Ulby the family mas Ignored 
 
 I have pointed to the chief explanation of 
 this in respect of early Christianity. Let 
 me briefly give one or two reasons for the 
 ignoring of the family in the later movement. 
 When Christianity had won in the Empire, 
 Roman social life, and consequently Roman 
 
 7 
 
law, had largely lost its old ideas of the 
 family and its correlative idea of status. 
 The individual and its necessary correlative 
 of contract had come in. So when the 
 methods of the primitive Christian social 
 development met those of a decaying civili¬ 
 zation — a social condition in which there 
 seems always to be a revival of individualism 
 without the earlier conserving faith — and 
 the Church borrowed the legal forms of the 
 times, she unconsciously turned her influ¬ 
 ence into channels that determined still more 
 fixedly her own later ideas upon these sub¬ 
 jects; for the later individualistic Roman 
 law was naturally used to shape the eccle¬ 
 siastical canons of the times. Here was one 
 of the ways in which the Rome of the early 
 Christian era captured the Church she was 
 forced to serve, by lending to it her own 
 legal institutions. The individualism of this 
 later Roman law captured and enslaved the 
 Church. Fortunately, though with tardy 
 results, early Christianity found a somewhat 
 better soil for her domestic ideas in the for¬ 
 ests of Germany and elsewhere, where do¬ 
 mestic institutions were in some respects of 
 a type nearer to nature, to which Christ had 
 at the first told his disciples to look for their 
 principles of a true family, and where these 
 more primitive social conditions shaped the 
 law of the family. The German law of 
 marriage of our day has been built up by a 
 return to the earlier and truer type of Teu- 
 
 8 
 
tonic principles. It is part of a system of 
 family law. 
 
 The Protestant Reformation, with its 
 reaction from the Roman Catholic doctrine 
 and practice, its insistence on the responsi¬ 
 bility of the individual, and its aim to purify 
 individual morals, did less than it otherwise 
 would have done to correct the current 
 working theory of Christianity regarding 
 them; for the Reformation was not so much 
 social as individual in its treatment of morals. 
 
 Other things added their influence to that 
 of the Reformation. The printing-press 
 made knowledge free to all, and so helped 
 to individualize men. The discovery of a 
 new world, the methods of modern science 
 and modern invention, greatly added to the 
 forces that made for individualism. John 
 Locke may be singled out of a school of 
 thinkers who moulded the religious life of 
 our own country and its politics, as well as 
 that of other countries, for upwards of a 
 century. Men as far apart as Jonathan 
 Edwards and Thomas Jefferson felt his 
 power. The “ Natural Man ” of Rousseau, 
 who was the political apostle of Locke, was 
 an individualized savage, whom we now 
 know to be the pure abstraction of a specu¬ 
 lative philosophy; though he long filled the 
 minds of many. But the theology of 
 Edwards, in modern evangelism and modern 
 politics, absorbed this individualism, or ac¬ 
 centuated it so as to slough off its intensest 
 adherents into new sects in Church and new 
 
 9 
 
factions in politics more extreme than the 
 bodies they had left. So long as this trend 
 was all controlling, the larger conception of 
 the family had small chance. This individ¬ 
 ualism was unnoticed, or attacked, when 
 opposed at all, chiefly on grounds of per¬ 
 sonal welfare and its consequences to the 
 State through the weakened public morality 
 it produced. 
 
 ttfbat fja$ Been Done. 
 
 From this point of view I think we shall 
 far better see the true greatness of the work 
 which Christianity set out to do for the fam¬ 
 ily. The achievements, which Dr. Storrs 
 and others have put into popular form, are 
 all the more wonderful when we come to 
 understand the great limitations under which 
 Christianity has wrought most of this time, 
 and which she has accepted for one reason 
 and another. They are none the less grand 
 because they are still fragments of the ulti¬ 
 mate work. Christianity has done a noble 
 task for the family, but in spite of her bond¬ 
 age to the world in regard to the theory and 
 principles of this institution. 
 
 And now, I think, Christianity, in this 
 country certainly, has been led, by the 
 seriousness of the perils of our domestic life, 
 and by contemporaneous movements of life 
 and thought, to enter with considerably 
 clearer vision upon what may be called a new 
 epoch in its treatment of the family. The 
 war of 1861 gave us new ideas of national 
 
 10 
 
unity, as something organic and not to be 
 explained on the individualistic notions of 
 contract. State rights then became subordi¬ 
 nate to National relations. Within the same 
 decade or so we began to use the new 
 methods of historical and comparative juris¬ 
 prudence. These methods were not only 
 fatal to the claims of the contract theory of 
 the origin of social institutions, but they 
 helped us to see something of the power of 
 the family in shaping early life and law. 
 Theories of evolution had been also germi¬ 
 nating, and began to be applied in the study 
 of the history and nature of human society. 
 And, meanwhile, similar methods of study, 
 the longing for historic truth and some or¬ 
 ganic expression in outward conduct for 
 the growing unity of life, found vigorous 
 expression. 
 
 Che new Opportunity. 
 
 In this last social ferment Christianity is 
 fast becoming alive to its new opportunity 
 regarding the family. The universities, and 
 scholars outside them, are creating a litera¬ 
 ture and science of the subject, both for the 
 scientific value of the family and home in 
 themselves, and for the necessity of this 
 knowledge to the comprehension of sociol¬ 
 ogy. The theological schools and colleges 
 are awake to its importance, both for the 
 clergy and for the men and women of ordi¬ 
 nary liberal education. The Sunday school 
 has begun to see its own great opportunity 
 
 ii 
 
for the use of the family in its Home De¬ 
 partment, which is now rapidly growing in 
 numbers and power. And lastly, Christian 
 philanthropy is turning its attention to the 
 home as the source of much of the poverty, 
 crime, and intemperance of the people, and 
 as worthy of infinitely more attention than 
 it has yet received for its preventive and re¬ 
 cuperating forces. All this will tell more 
 and more on public law, which surely 
 though slowly responds to the changes of 
 social life. 
 
 That Christianity has done a work for the 
 family of unspeakable value occasions deep 
 gratitude, and our thankfulness will not be 
 the less for our recognition of the limitations 
 that have hitherto restricted her successes. 
 But a far better, a far more inspiring, thought 
 may be found in our recognition of her 
 coming emancipation from the bondage of 
 the past, as that has kept her from seeing the 
 real problem as it is now presented for her 
 study, and from her early entrance upon new 
 conquests. The lessons of history are only 
 half learned unless they help us to estimate 
 correctly the present and direct us to the 
 future. What Christianity has done for the 
 family should help us to see what it is now 
 about to do in order to conserve and extend 
 the conquests of the past. 
 
 Auburndale , Mass. 
 
 12