Thirdly, the family sets spiritual values first.  Our age especially needs men and women who think in terms of spiritual values, who rise above the measures of pounds and dollars and weigh life by personal qualities and worth.  That is precisely what the home does.  It prizes most highly the helpless, economically worthless infant; it measures every member by his personal character, his affectional worth.  Its riches do not depend on that which money can buy, but on the personal qualities of love, goodness, kindness; on memories, associations, affection.  The true home gives to every child-life the power to choose the things of the world on the basis of their worth in personality.  Only the mistaken judgments of later years, the short-minded wisdom of the world, make youth gradually lose the habit of preferring the home’s spiritual benefits to the material rewards of the world of business.  No life can be furnished for the strain of our modern materialism that lacks the basis of idealism furnished in the true family.

Sec. 3.  POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED—­THE MORAL LIFE

Fourthly, the power of family living to develop love as loyalty is to be noted.  In this small group is laid the foundation of the moral life.  “The family is the primer in the moral education of the race."[6] Here the new-born life begins to relate itself to other lives.  Here it begins life in an atmosphere saturated by love, the central principle of all virtue, eventually loyalty to ideals in persons and devotion to them, “the greatest of these,” because it is the parent of all virtue.  The moral life, that life which is adjusted, capable, and adequately motived for helpful, efficient, enriching living with all other lives, is not a matter of rules, regulations, and restrictions.  Neither is it a matter of separate habits as to this or the other kind of behavior, though this comes nearer to it than do rules and prescriptions.  The character-life which parents desire for their children is not that which will do the right thing when it has discovered that right thing in some book of rules, nor that life which will do the right thing because society points that way, nor even that life which automatically does the right thing, but it is the life which, constantly moved by some high inner compulsion, some imperative of vision and ideal, moves to the highest possible plane of action in every situation.  This is the life of loyalty.  It begins with loyalty to persons, with that devotion which begins with affection.  In no other place is this so well developed as in the relations of the family.  This is the child’s first and most potential school.  Here the lessons are wholly unconscious; here they are strengthened by the pleasurable emotions.  It is a joy to be loyal to those we love.  Indeed, who can tell which comes first, the joy, the loyalty, or the love?