Sec. 1.  DEVELOPMENT AS A RELIGIOUS INSTITUTION

The family is the most important religious institution in the life of today.  It ranks in influence before the church.  It has always held this place.  Even among primitive peoples, where family life was an uncertain quantity, the relations of parents, or of one of the parents, to the children afforded the opportunity most frequently used for their instruction in tribal religious ideals and customs.  We cannot generalize as to the practices of savage man in regard to family life, for those practices range from common promiscuous relationships, without apparent care for offspring, to a family unity and purity approaching the best we know; but this much is certain, that there was a common sense of responsibility for the training of young children in moral and religious ideas and customs, and that, in the degree that the family approached to separateness and unity, it accepted the primary responsibility for this task.  The higher the type of family life the more fully does it discharge its function in the education of the child.[7]

It might be safe to say that among primitive peoples there were three stages, or types, of relationship based on the breeding of children, or three stages of development toward family life.  The first is a loose and indefinite relationship existing principally between the adults, or the males and females, under which children born when not desired are neglected or strangled and, when acceptable, may be in the care of either parent, or of neither.  Since the group, associated through infancy with at least one parent, is as yet undeveloped, any instruction will be individual and usually incidental.

The second form is that of a kind of family unity, either about the mother or the father, or both, or about a group of parents, in which the children live together and are sheltered and nurtured for their earlier years.  Here, however, the real relationship of the child is to the tribe, the family is but his temporary guardian, and, at least by the age of puberty, he will be initiated into the tribal secrets.  If he is a boy, he will cease to be a member of the family group and will go to live in the “men’s house,” becoming a part of the larger life of the tribe.[8] Such moral and religious instruction as he may acquire will come from the songs, traditions, and conversation which he hears as a child.

The third type approaches the modern ideal, with a greater or less degree of permanent unity between the two parents and with permanence in the group of the offspring.  The parental responsibility continues for a greater length of time and, since the tribe makes smaller claims, and the parents live in the common domestic group, much more instruction is possible and is given.  The tribal ideals, the traditions, observances, and religious rites are imparted to children gradually in their homes.