encourages the resort to divorce in circumstances of family disturbance which would speedily right themselves in the present as they have done in the past if those concerned knew that their happiness and comfort for years compelled an adjustment of life.  When as at present any one who loses his temper can rush off to a court and get a marriage dissolved for some quite trivial reason, there is small encouragement to practice self-control.  If a man and woman know that the consequences of conduct must be faced by them, and cannot be avoided by thrusting them upon others, they will no doubt in the course of time learn to exercise a little self-control.

The family is the foundation of the state because, among other things, it is the natural training place of citizens:  no public training in schools and camps can for a moment safely be looked to as a substitute or an equivalent of wholesome family influence.  If the family does not make good citizens we cannot have good citizens.  The family too is at the basis of organised religious life; if the family does not make good Christians we shall not have good Christians.  The Sunday School and the Church societies are poor substitutes for the religious influence of the family, as the school and the camp are for its social interests.

One is inclined to stress the obvious failure of the family to fulfil its alloted functions in the teaching of religion as the root difficulty that the Christian religion has to encounter and the most comprehensive cause of its relative failure in modern life.  The responsibility for the religious and moral training of children rests squarely upon those who have assumed the responsibility of bringing them into the world, and it cannot be rightly pushed off on to some one else.  To the protest of parents that they are incompetent to conduct such training, the only possible reply is a blunt, “Whose fault is that?” If you have been so careless of the fundamental responsibilities of life, you are incompetent to assume a relation which of necessity carries such responsibility with it.  It is no light matter to have committed to you the care of an immortal soul whose eternal future may quite well be conditioned on the way in which you fulfil your trust.  It would be well as a preliminary to marriage to take a little of the time ordinarily given to its frivolous accompaniments and seriously meditate upon the words of our Lord which seem wholly appropriate to the circumstance:  “Whoso shall cause to stumble one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea.”  It is the careless and incompetent training of children which in fact “causes them to stumble” when the presence of word and example would have held them straight.  It has been (to speak personally) the greatest trial of my priesthood that out of the thousands of children I have dealt with, in only rare cases have I had the entire support of the family; and I have always considered that I was fortunate when I met with no interference and was given an indifferent tolerance.  It is heart-breaking to see years of careful work brought to naught (so far as the human eye can see:  the divine eye can see deeper) by the brutal materialism of a father and the silly worldliness of a mother.