Family life is a tremendous test, it brings out the best and the worst of those who are associated in it.  The ordinary restraints of social intercourse are of less force in the intimacy of family life:  there is less need felt to watch conduct, or to mask what we know are our disagreeable traits.  It is quite easy for character to deteriorate in the freedom of such intercourse.  It is pretty sure to do so unless there is the constant pressure of principle in the other direction.  The great safeguard is the sort of love that is based on mutual respect,—­respect both for ourselves and for others.  We talk a good deal as though love were always alike; as though the fact that a man and a woman love each other were always the same sort of fact.  It does not require much knowledge of human nature or much reflection to convince us that that is not the case.  Love is not a purely physical fact; and outside its physical implications there are many factors which may enter, whose existence constitute the differentia from case to case.  It is upon these varying elements that the happiness of the family life depends.  One of the most important is that character on either side shall be such as to inspire respect.  Many a marriage goes to pieces on this rock; it is found that the person who exercised a certain kind of fascination shows in the intimacy of married life a character and qualities which are repulsive; a shallowness which inspires contempt, an egotism which is intolerable, a laxity in the treatment of obligations which destroys any sense of the stability of life.  A marriage which does not grow into a relation of mutual honour and respect must always be in a state of unstable equilibrium, constantly subject to storms of passion, to suspicion and distrust.

And therefore such a marriage will afford no safe basis on which to build a family life.  But without a stable family life a stable social and religious life is impossible.  It is therefore no surprise to those who believe that the powers of evil are active in the world to find that the family is the very centre of their attack at the present time.  The crass egotism lying back of so much modern teaching is nowhere more clearly visible than in the assertion of the right of self-determination so blatantly made in popular writings.  By self-determination is ultimately meant the right of the individual to seek his own happiness in his own way, and to make pleasure the rule of his life.  “The right to happiness” is claimed in utter disregard of the fact that the claim often involves the unhappiness of others.  “The supremacy of love,” meaning the supremacy of animalism, is the excuse for undermining the very foundations of family life.  No obligation, it appears, can have a binding force longer than the parties to it find gratification in it.  Personal inclination and gratification is held sufficient ground for action whose consequences are far from being personal, which, in fact, affect the sane and healthy state of society as a whole.