Just how men and women will live in society is determined principally by the bent of their characters in the social order of the family.  Their attitude to the world follows the attitude of the family, especially of the parents.  They interpret the larger world by the lesser.  The home is the great school of citizenship and social living.

All the moral and religious problems of the family find a focus in the purpose of preparing persons for social living.  The family justifies its cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and motived lives.  As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the coming generation to live in a religious society, in one which will steadily move toward the divine ideal of perfect family relations through brotherhood and fatherhood.  Its business is not to get children ready for heaven, but to train them to make all life heavenly.  Its aim is not alone children who will not tear down the parents’ reputation, but men and women who will build up the actual worth and beauty of all lives.

The realization, in the family, of the purpose of training youth to social living and service in the religious spirit depends on two things:  a spirit and passion in the family for social justice and order, and the direction of the activities of the family toward training in social usefulness.

Only the social spirit can give birth to the social spirit.  True lovers of men, who set the values of life and of the spirit first, who give their lives that all men may have freedom and means to find more abundant life, come out of the families where the passion of human love burns high.  The selfish family, self-centered, caring not at all in any deep sense for the well-being of others, existing to extract the juice of life and let who will be nourished on the rind, becomes effective to make the social highwayman, the oppressor.  From such a family comes he who breaks laws for his pocketbook and impedes the enactment of laws lest human rights should prevent his acquisition of wealth; he who hates his brother man—­unless that brother has more than he has; the foe of the kingdom of goodness and peace and brotherhood.

And goodness is as contagious as badness.  Children catch the spirit of social love and idealism in the family.  Where men and women are deeply concerned with all that makes the world better for lives, better for babies and mothers, for workers, and, above all, for the values of the spirit gained through leisure, opportunities, and higher incentives; where the family is more concerned with folks than with furniture; where habitually it thinks of people as Jesus did, as the objects most of all worth seeking, worth investing in, there children receive direction, habituation, and motivation for the life of religion, the life that binds them in glad love to the service of their fellows, and makes them think of all their life as the one great chance to serve, to make a better world, and to bring God’s great family closer together here.