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Family Life as a Vocation

The greatest of all wisdom is that which leads men and women to see the real significance of their lives while they are still living.  Life’s values, like the manna in the wilderness, must be gathered daily.  If not nourished day by day the power to live atrophies and dies; and no one can live well to-day on the shrunken memories of yesterday.  A full and significant life is its own justification; and in a last analysis philosophies and theologies offer us only the life more abundantly which the great Teacher said he came into the world to bring.  Buddhism offers us eternal peaceful existence in Nirvana; Epicureanism offers pleasure, which is but an intensification of life; Stoicism offers us life freed from disturbing forces; and the great lure which Christianity has always held before humanity is life eternal.  Life is its own justification.

We have maintained throughout this volume that complete self-realization is impossible for the half-units which we call men and women, when either lives alone.  On every side of their natures they are complementary; and the unit of human life must be found in the family composed of a man and woman who love each other and the children born of their love.  “There are two worlds below, the home and outside of it.”  It is in this unit, under the stress of sexual passion and maternal love, that all the finer forces of our civilization have had their origin.  Unselfishness, devotion, pity and the higher altruisms all hark back to the home as their source.

But, meantime, evil counsels prevail and one hears everywhere of the antagonistic interests of men and women.  There can be no real rivalry between a man’s soul and his body, between science and religion, between man and woman.  The trouble all rests back in the failure to realize the incompleteness of man or woman alone for any of the purposes of life.  And there is that evil notion which still afflicts economics that when two trade one must lose.  The fact is that, in all honest trade, buyer and seller gain alike; and fair exchange makes all who participate in it rich.  It is so in all real relations between these half-creatures we call men and women.  In agreement, association and cooeperation lies strong and significant life for both.  In antagonism, separation and competition lie arid, poor, mean lives, egotistic and conceited, vapid and fickle.

In primitive life, the family furnished a full and adequate career for men and women alike.  The political life was the family life; each family was a religious group; families mustered for war; and each family maintained within itself a wide range of industrial activity.  But, because this unit was so basal, because all later special developments of state, church and industry came from it, it was steadily perverted.  Warped from its original purpose, it has served in turn, as we have seen, to define and secure all our later institutions until it has become the servant of state, church, social ambition, property and industrial advance.  Marriage and the birthrate are seldom discussed to-day from the point of view of individual needs; but are almost always considered from the point of view of national and industrial efficiencies.