Sec. 4.  PURPOSEFUL ORGANIZATION

At present the home is suffering, just as the city is suffering, from a lack of that purposeful organization which will order the parts aright and subject the processes to the most important and ultimate purposes.  The city is simply an aggregation of persons, scarcely having any conscious organization, thrown together for purposes of industry.  It will before very long organize itself for purposes of personal welfare and education.  The family is usually a group bound in ties of struggle for shelter, food, and pleasure.  Such consciousness as it possesses is that of being helplessly at the mercy of conflicting economic forces.  The adjustment of those forces, their subjection to man’s higher interests, must come in the future and will help the family to freedom to discover its true purpose.

It is easy to insist on the responsibility of parents for the character-training of their children, but it is difficult to see how that responsibility can be properly discharged under industrial conditions that take both father and mother out of the home the whole day and leave them too weary to stay awake in the evening, too poor to furnish decent conditions of living, and too apathetic under the dull monotony of labor to care for life’s finer interests.  The welfare of the family is tied up with the welfare of the race; if progress can be secured in one part progress in the whole ensues.

There are those who raise the question whether family life is a permanent form of social organization for which we may wisely contend, or is but a phase from which the race is now emerging.  Some see signs that the ties of marriage will be but temporary, that children will be born, not into families but into the life of the state, bearing only their mothers’ names and knowing no brothers and sisters save in the brotherhood of the state.  Whether the permanent elements in family life furnish a sufficiently worthy basis for its preservation is a subject for careful consideration.

Sec. 5.  THE HOME AND THE FAMILY

The family is more important than the home, just as the man is more than his clothing.  The form of the home changes; the life of the family continues unchanged in its essential characteristics.  The family causes the home to be.  Professor Arthur J. Todd insists that the family is the basis of marriage, rather than marriage the cause of the family.[3] Small groups for protection and social living would precede formal arrangements of monogamy.  Westermarck concludes that it was “for the benefit of the young that male and female continued to live together."[4] The importance of this consideration for us lies in the thought of the overshadowing importance of this social group which we now call the family.  The family is the primary cell of society, the first unit in social organization.  Our thought must balance itself between the importance of this social group, to be preserved in its integrity, and the value of the home, with its varied forms of activity and ministry, as a means of preserving and developing this group, the family.