loyalty to both parents until reason and judgment shall guide affection to a true understanding of the sad condition.

The greatest of all needs in this whole realm of obligation toward children is for more and more effective ethical training; suited to present and not to past social conditions. We cannot longer make people cower before "that hangman's whip, the fear of hell." We cannot longer make the majority of instructed people accept as final authority, and obey as a supreme command, the canons of any church. We cannot longer secure in sufficient degree the higher ideals, and selfcontrol in their realization now required, solely by the ancient appeal to filial feeling. That appeal to filial feeling rested for its greatest leverage upon a reverence for the superior wisdom of the old which is now endangered, if not destroyed, by the constant appeal to do new things to make the oncoming generation wiser and better than the last. All the movements of modern thought and life are against the old forms of social control which made for family stability and the sacrifice of personal desire for the welfare of offspring. We must translate our ethical teaching and our spiritual approach into new terms suited to the new idealism of the new social order. This is not hard to do, since social science, as truly as religion and family autonomy, makes the primal object of the family the well-being, the nurture, the training and the happiness of offspring. Social science makes it incumbent upon the man who would be a good citizen, and the woman who would make just return for social ex

penditure on her behalf, to place the interests of their children in marriage above all small demands of their own desires. No sociologist accepts Milton's idea of marriage as "an arrangement solely for the happiness" of individual men and women. Marriage is indeed the highest means society affords for securing the happiness of the majority of human beings. Marriage is also the finest and most effective moral discipline of both men and women who love each other and wish to, and do, call out the best in each other's nature. But if there are children born of the union, and marriage can hardly be fully complete either as joy or as discipline without children, then the social duty to make that marriage successful in the highest sense as a foundation for family life must be accepted as binding.

The deepest and most compelling need is, therefore, to reincarnate the old sanctities of the domestic order in new forms. Marriage must still, and more than of | old, be considered a Sacrament. Not in the sense that elevates one church ceremony above all other rituals, and denies to adult human beings the right to free themselves from intolerable conditions provided certain formulæ have once been pronounced. But a Sacrament in the sense that makes marriage a spiritual as well as a physical bond, that makes it the outward symbol of the inner unity of the race.

Marriage, again, must be held, as our Anglo-Saxon ancestors made it appear, as a free contract between those who choose each the other. Not in the sense of that selfish individualism that makes freedom synonymous with a choice that regards only the pas

sion of the heart, and that ends its obligation when its preference ceases. Not that-on peril of the loss of social order itself; but a free contract "on the soul's Rialto" in the sense of an inviolable right of selective love to guide the path to the altar of a pledged devotion.

Marriage, again, must be held more consciously than it is now as a social arrangement for the benefit of society as a whole. Not in the sense of a mechanical control, that tries stupendous or even ludicrous experiments in artificial production of supermen and superwomen; but marriage as a social arrangement for the benefit of the social whole in the sense that subordinates even love itself, even the passionate longing of the lonely heart, to the higher interests of humanity and to the imperious demands of the social conscience.

To help thus in even the smallest degree to reincarnate the old sanctities of the family bond in new forms is a far better service at this time of unrest than, on the one side, to exalt freedom as an end in itself; or, on the other side, to try to revive obsolete forms of subjection of the individual to the domestic autonomy. Above all things socially futile and morally insolent is the attitude of men who attempt to solve alone, without either the judgment or the authority of women, the problems of marriage and divorce! There is nothing which so betrays and emphasizes the evil effect upon the spiritual nature of men of the long subjection of women to masculine control, as the findings of church councils and court decisions and academic discussions, in which men alone participate, as these

are related to family life. The monstrous assumption that men can know better than women what women want, or ought to want, or really need, in that marriage relation which means to human beings of the mother-sex a tax upon the whole nature such as men cannot experience, would be impossible to decent and intelligent men were it not for the extreme egotism engendered in all human beings by the possession of unjust power over others.

On the other hand, nothing is more mischievous in a period like our own, when our ideals of democracy have run ahead of our social technique in their administration, than to ignore the claims of society to set metes and bounds by law to the relation of the sexes. To exaggerate the demands of romantic love as above those of the social good, is a mistake of the utmost danger. To assume the anarchistic attitude toward marriage, and to believe that that relationship between men and women which is free of courts and statutes is equal or superior to that which is entered upon soberly and publicly under legal bonds to definitely defined obligations, is a mistake that implies a fatal lack of moral balance. "He is not free who can do what he wills," says St. Augustine. He only is free who can will what he ought, responds our modern thought. The marriage law may be faulty; it may be one-sided; it may be in some particulars a dead record of ancient and outworn ideals; it may contain things that the moral sense and legal practice should get rid of at oncebut the conviction that law and not personal caprice should rule the most vital of human relationships is

vastly more important than any manifestation of that law and should be held inviolate at all times. As Milton himself says, to "let upstart passions catch the government from reason" is but to confuse moral issues; and the reason of the race has always embodied itself in laws to which individual wishes should be subordinate.

New thoughts for the new time we need most surely in the realm of law as applied to the family order. To let what Channing called "that bondage to habit which lives on its old virtues" enslave us is foolish indeed. New thoughts and new works for the new days; but above all, in respect to the home which is the central socializing force in human society, a new consecration to the utmost reach of social wisdom and to the most faithful obedience to the social demand upon the personal life.