FRIENDS AND THE CHOSEN ONE
"The path by which we twain did go,
Which led by tracts that pleased us well,
Thro' four sweet years arose and fell,
From flower to flower, from snow to snow:
And we with singing cheer'd the way,
And, crown'd with all the season lent,
From April on to April went,
And glad at heart from May to May.
And all we met was fair and good,
And all was good that Time could bring,
And all the secret of the Spring
Moved in the chambers of the blood."
--TENNYSON.
"There is no man that imparteth his joy to his friend but he
joyeth the more; and no man who imparteth his grief to his friend
but he grieveth the less."--BACON.
"True, active, productive friendship consists in equal pace in
life, in moving forward together, steadily, however much our way
of thought and life may vary."--GOETHE.
"Accept no person against thy soul."--ECCLESIASTICUS.
"Your love, vouchsafe it royal-hearted Few
And I will set no common price thereon;
But aught of inward faith must I forego,
Or miss one drop from truth's baptismal hand,
Think poorer thoughts, pray cheaper prayers, and grow
Less worthy trust, to meet your heart's demand.
Farewell! Your wish I for your sake deny;
Rebel to love, in truth to love, am I."
--D.A. WASSON.
=The Power of Friendship.=--The man who said, "Our relations are
thrust upon us; thank heaven we may choose our friends" expressed a
feeling shared by many, that fate may handicap us by giving us birth
in an uncongenial circle, but we may recoup ourselves by chosen
friends and enjoy companionship with them which our kin cannot
furnish.
Friendship has inspired many of the greatest deeds and many of the
noblest poems, and has given us examples of heroic devotion almost
passing the love of man for woman. It is not within our purpose to
recall these great friendships, but they are familiar and furnish the
unfailing stimulus of finer sentiment in youth as the classic examples
are recited to each generation. Real friendship is a sacred thing.
There are pinchbeck imitations which are neither sacred nor helpful.
The "mashes" and the "crushes" of school-life are not even good
imitations. The bargain-counter exchange of services--"you give me
society uplift, and I will give you under-current influence," as one
woman frankly stated it to another, although it may be called
friendship, has no element of real affection in it, as the first one
to fail in "value received" so clearly understands. The unwholesome
absorption of one woman with another, so that no minute apart can be
endured, may be long-lived or an ephemeral expression of a weakness on
one or the other side, but it is not the best type of friendship.
Among men the submergence of one personality in another, so that
although there are two people there is but one mind and one purpose,
may be friendship, but it is not that equal comradeship which the
healthy-minded seek. The friendship between a man and a woman which
does not lead to marriage or desire for marriage may be a life-long
experience of the greatest value to themselves and to all their circle
of acquaintance and of activity; but for this type of friendship both
a rare man and a rare woman are needed. Perhaps it should be added
that either the man or the woman thus deeply bound in life-long
friendship who seeks marriage must find a still rarer man or woman to
wed, to make such a three-cornered comradeship a permanent success.
Friendship at its best is a task as well as a gratification. Nothing
in this world can be had for nothing. "Earth gets its price for what
earth gives us." A really great friendship is a test and a challenge
and a "time-consumer," as Emerson says. It is, next to marriage and
parenthood, the most exacting of human relationships. For this reason
few men and women can have a great friendship that does not lead to
marriage, and at the same time have a complete marriage with another.
For this reason again, the great friendships are generally between two
unmarried men or two unmarried women.
=The Newly Wed and Old Friends.=--Much is written of the sad
disillusion experienced by the newly wedded man when he finds his
friends are not as welcome at his new fireside as he had expected.
These friends of his are not of the sort prophesied by the love of
David and Jonathan, but they are valued comrades and he has
anticipated sharing the delights of his new home with them. Many a
woman in her desire to be all in all to her husband and in the selfish
absorption of an undisciplined affection, starts married life the
wrong way by making no place in the home life for these old friends of
her husband's bachelor life. That reacts often in the worst possible
manner upon his affection for her. She forgets too often that she is
not called upon to give up her friends. They can come, and do come,
when her husband is away at his work, while his friends, if they come
at all, must come in his leisure hours which she often wishes to
preempt for herself alone. It is the most short-sighted of follies for
a woman to try to sweep clean of all former interests and friendships
the life of the man with whom she is to try the great adventure of
marriage.
The most a wife can accomplish by selfish denial to her husband of his
right to keep his friends and enjoy the old as well as the new
companionship is to make it impossible for him to enjoy his friends in
her company. She can thus send him off on hunting trips or other
outside enjoyments which leave her lonely at home. The fact that few
worth-while men or women have lived to the marriage day without deep
affection for some friend, or perhaps for many friends, is not a
testimony to need of change when a new relation is formed but to the
enlargement of both circles of comradeship and their amalgamation into
friends of the family. This may be a difficult achievement. Many men
and women have found, to their surprise, that although they are in
love with wife or husband they are not at all in love with the
respective families and still less inclined to accept each other's
chosen friends as their own. One angle alone of the many-sided
character may have "made the match;" quite other angles have already
attracted and still hold the friends. These often mutually incongruous
friends of both sides must somehow be made to attach themselves to the
marriage plan or they may work much harm to the new home.
The art of holding on to old associations and yet substituting, where
substitution is wise or necessary, a new for an established
relationship is a great art. In the case of the newly married whose
friends have been in widely different circles, it is often an
impossible one.
Here is where the social wisdom that in some manner essays to make the
twain to be later one a part of the same or a very similar social
group, shows its finest results. When marriage was arranged by the
elders of the respective families there was likely to be a similarity
in the social standards of the two circles from which the bride and
groom were drawn. Their friends were usually so inevitably of the same
financial standing and of similar cultural ideals and manners that
they would be likely to be congenial to each other and all to both
husband and wife. When the one chosen was selected by the fathers and
mothers there were some essentials for successful married life secured
in advance. We have now come to feel that each couple must choose for
themselves and that conscious, selective love is the very essence of
that choice. It is well, however, to name over the essentials secured
by the arranged marriages, to which such an enlightened country as
France still gives much heed and still holds to some extent in family
control.
=Some Advantages in Choices of Marriage by the Elders.=--The old
arranged choice for marriage, in the first place, secured, and still
secures in countries not yet changed in this particular, a similar
financial position. Often greed of family prestige made the money end
the chief one and sacrificed everything else to the bringing together
of two great fortunes. Yet the fact that family choices usually united
those of similar financial standing and power of gratification of
taste did lead toward an easy adjustment of the young couple to life
together. One of the chief causes of unhappiness in marriages wholly
from personal choice and in response to an impulse of passionate
attachment is that the taste and "style" of living of the two has been
so different that it is hard, after the first glamour wears away, to
settle down to agreeable compromises. As a rule, "the beggar maid and
King Cophetua" can get on better than the young woman heiress and the
ex-chauffeur in such compromises; for it is always easier to extend
one's income than to contract it, and women can still owe all to the
loved one with better grace than men can bear the position of one
"marrying above his lot." The tendency of the older custom, however,
to limit all marriage choices on the basis of money to be contributed
to the common fund was, and is when now in force, as destructive to
real happiness in marriage as any ill-considered leaping across social
barriers could well be. It is well, therefore, that it is outgrown.
The second condition believed essential to success in marriage from
the point of view of family stability, when the marriage choice of the
loved one was made by the elders, is far more important than that of
financial equality. It is the congeniality of the two families to be
united by the marriage. The custom of betrothing their children as a
means of carrying on the close friendship of a lifetime beyond its
natural limit into the generations yet to be, is an old and not a
wholly bad one. It insures for the young couple a genuine love from
both sides the family line. To be sure, that love may be an oppressive
and undesired gift which one or the other of the young people ardently
wishes to ignore or to be freed from, but it contains also some
elements of a good start for those same young people in a mutually
devoted double parentage. When, however, as in Eastern countries, it
leads to betrothal in infancy or very early childhood and sets the
girl who is to be the wife in the family of her betrothed when she is
too young to know her own real nature or to have a mind to make up
about what she would wish for herself, it may be and generally is an
evil thing. In the questions concerning the family set forth by the
Chinese inquiry, to which allusion has already been made, the first
set of problems relates to "Early Engagements," and it is asked, "Is
the practice of parents in arranging for the engagement of a girl
while still a mere child productive of happiness in the future home?"
And, again, "Can a woman refuse to marry a man whom her family decides
she should marry, after the formal engagement has taken place?" To our
Western ideas the answer is so plain to both these questions that one
may be impatient at their repetition here. Yet it is certainly true
that many people freely engage themselves to their later unhappiness
and there have been many family virtues bred on even the outgrown
fashion of family choice. Where unhappiness has been prevented in the
results of family choice doubtless the friendship of the two family
heads has had much to do with such mitigation of bad effects of
extreme parental control in marriage.
Social protection of the young has in a measure superseded the ancient
family arrangement, but where it has not, a young person may be found
to-day in as bad a position through personal choice as that of the
girl set in a home without her own consent to be the future wife of a
man she has not seen. The difference is, however, a vital one.
In the case of the Chinese girl the status is fixed. In the case of a
girl of the Western world, even of most unfortunate circumstance or
weakness of character, there is a possibility of escape from even the
worst conditions into a new relationship to life and to marriage. We
have suicides in the Western world, and some of them of young girls
who, free to choose their mates, loved not wisely but too well; but
the toll of suicides of wives in China is one that testifies that
polygamy and the power of fathers over their daughters in marriage and
even in their sale for immoral uses, and the legal right to hold girls
in domestic slavery, are evils not made tolerable even by the
high-minded who try to perpetuate the friendship as well as the power
of leading families by intermarriage.
An early Massachusetts law declared that "No female orphan could be
given in marriage during her minority except with the approbation of a
majority of the selectmen of the town." This was proof that in this
country from the first, the social power was used not to make girls
accept husbands that might be chosen for them but to protect girls
from exploitation of designing persons, and if they had not a family
protection they were held secure in that of the officers of the
community. The law of 1719, in New York, that no person under
twenty-one should be married without the written consent of parent or
guardian was a step in the direction of social control. This law aimed
not to make marriage choices for any young person but to safeguard
such choice from possible harm.
The ancient family choice in marriage tried in the third place to give
every one an equal chance to be married. The families concerned, when
the age thought to be marriageable had been reached, sought to give
the young persons a place in the family order. The idea of bachelors
and maids of mature years was not only repugnant, it was an indictment
of the vigilance and good offices of the elders. When a certain Doctor
Brickell practised medicine in North Carolina in about 1731, he
declared that "She that continues unmarried until twenty is reckoned a
stale maid, which is a very indifferent character in this country;"
and in New England the unmarried man, as elsewhere, was subjected to
special tax and social odium.
The family arrangement for marriage of the young did one thing, at
least, in a time when women and girls enjoyed little protection or
financial security outside of marriage--it set at work forces to
provide husbands for many girls who would not be the first choice in a
free competition for masculine favor.
=Some Ancient Spinsters, But Few.=--There were, however, some
distinguished women of the older time who never married. Margaret
Brent, of Maryland, for example, whose appeal for "voyce and vote with
men," in the making of laws to which she must owe allegiance, is
historic. And that Mary Carpenter, sister of Alice, wife of Governor
Bradford, who, at the beginning of her ninety-first year, was declared
a "godly old maid;" and, again, that "ancient maid of forty years,"
who is said to have founded the town of Taunton, Massachusetts. Others
of distinction might be mentioned. These show clearly that the right
not to marry at all, and the right not to marry a person whom she had
not seen or, having seen, did not want as husband, was well sustained
in the case of young girls in our own country from the first.
The lot of most women here in the United States, as elsewhere in the
world, includes marriage; and although no one wants to go back to
family arrangement of nuptials, the desirability of marriage within a
congenial and familiar circle--that which the family arrangement
distinctly set out to secure--is still obvious.
The fourth element of family stability and well-being which the
ancient parental arrangement of marriage was intended to secure is
deliberation and chance for learning all the facts on both sides, so
that there may be no marrying in haste to repent at leisure. The
reaction from this deliberation in tying the nuptial knot is seen in
"running away to be married" without the slightest knowledge on either
side of the qualities or capacities of the chosen partner and without
giving the parents any opportunity of safeguarding from disastrous
choice. This is the swing of the pendulum in a new freedom, often to
personal disaster. Social ideals and legal provisions are alike
engaged more and more to prevent too ignorant and too hasty marriages.
Such may turn out to have been made in heaven as nearly as the average
union, but the chances are against that happy consummation.
=New Demands for Social Control of Marriage Choices.=--Social wisdom
obliges more deliberation in the case of young people seeking a
marriage license on their own initiative and perhaps after a very
brief acquaintance. There is a strong demand that a certain period
shall elapse between the request for the license and its granting and
that sufficient publicity be secured to make it easy for interested
parties to ascertain any facts concerning both the man and the woman
involved, which might make the marriage either illegal, as bigamy, or
a catastrophe, as uniting one unfit for marriage with an unsuspecting
person blinded by sudden attraction. More than this, many States of
our Union are beginning processes of law to require certificates of
physical fitness, of freedom from infectious or dangerous disease, and
some statement of facts as to previous obedience to law and ability
for self-support such as alone would make marriage successful.
Ministers of religion of various sects are taking more and more a
stand against marriage of persons whom they know are of bad habits or
otherwise likely to give a married partner an unhappy life. Insanity
in the family is now considered in some States a disqualification for
marriage, and statutes requiring some family testimony to facts
concerning that inheritance are coming into enactment and enforcement.
The tragedy of marrying ignorantly into a certain and hopeless fate of
union with one who can never be of sound mind is so terrible that the
state itself is trying to safeguard carelessness on that point. The
medical profession is more and more acting a parental part in
requiring the registry of diseases that are most unsocial in their
effect--diseases incident to vice, and which make any man while
suffering from them unfit for marriage. It is proposed by many, and by
law required in some States, that no marriage license shall be given
without a certificate of both mental and physical fitness, to be
handed to the officer before registry of the application, in order
that there may be no public refusal on such grounds of unfitness after
it is known that a license to marry has been sought. This would be far
better than, as has been proposed by some persons, for clergymen to
take the initiative in requiring such physical and mental tests after
a request to marry two people and after a license has been secured.
After a matter has gone so far as to result in a request to a
clergyman to officiate at the marriage ceremony, the exaction of an
examination which the state has not previously required would
inevitably, as has been already shown in some instances, lead to
suspicion and bad feeling. The duty of the state, which alone in our
country gives power to marry (the clergyman performing the ceremony
pronouncing the couple married "by virtue of the power invested in him
by the state"), is clear. That duty is to take all initiative in all
previous inquiries aimed at preventing the marriage of unfit persons.
If the state does take such initiative and for all alike, no matter
what their social standing or reputation may be, then there is no
stigma for any individual and no suspicion aroused to injure any class
of persons. There seems as good reason why a compulsory physical and
mental examination, together with an inquiry into the main facts of a
person's life in order to prevent fraud and exploitation, should
always precede the giving of a marriage license as for the required
physical and mental examination of children when they enter the
tax-supported public school. It is, in both cases, a way by which
society secures itself, in the interest of the family and of social
life, against the fostering or continuance of evils that may be
prevented from poisoning the sources of moral and intellectual growth.
The fiat has gone forth in the Western world that no one shall be
compelled to marry against his or her will. The first revolt from
family control of marriage, that which made so many persons believe
that any one should be allowed to marry any one whom he or she might
choose, is now, however, waning. Elements of social control are
superseding the "marriage broker" and the parental office in deciding
what unions shall be allowed.
=The Young Should be Helped to Make Wise Choices.=--Wisdom and
consistency are not yet developed in this new way of helping the
young, even against their will, to avoid mistakes of ignorance and
folly, but they are developing. Meanwhile, many children still revere
their parents' wishes and ideals, even if the wild few do as they
please without regard to their elders. Most marriages in our country
are not only safely entered upon but happy in results because of
tendencies and tastes engendered in homes of love, truth, and
goodness. The increase of social control in the direction of knowledge
and caution even among the best people, and the safeguarding of the
less advantaged in family training, must go on until all the good
things parental choice gave to marriage arrangements are retained more
perfectly and all the bad things outgrown.
The fifth element in the ancient parental control of marriage choices
was the definite placing of youth under the leadership of age and thus
holding firm the inherited "mores" to make the family stable in ideal
as in practice. We have now a revolt of youth against the leadership
of age. We have now, even among those whose affection for their
parents is strong in feeling and generous in action, an idea that the
convictions and reverences of the older generation are outgrown and
for the better. There is a general impression, perhaps speeded unduly
by the war, that what is new must be good, and what is old must be, if
not bad, at least not the best. The decay of family religion lessens
respect for old sanctions. The fact that business and pleasure alike
take the different members of each family on different ways all the
week and Sunday, too, make each age represented in the household
influenced chiefly by its own set of friends. The way in which
mechanical invention gives unexampled speed in opposite directions to
the young and the old alike intensifies the segregation of each group
and minimizes the influence of the family bond. The fact, perhaps of
all most significant, that every form of art, from the lowest to the
highest, is changing before our eyes into something new and strange
tends toward the unconscious absorption by youth of new ideals of what
is desirable in life. These things all conspire to make youth
impatient of age.
=The Revolt of Youth.=--Many of the boys who went to torture and
cripplement in the war have returned to declare that the old life is
gone, and if there can be no better one devised and realized then the
old world should go too. Many of the girls who went overseas to a
vivid excitement and a stimulus of unwonted comradeship with men feel
that they have so much more insight into real things than do their
mothers that they know not only what is best for themselves but what
is best for all youth. Many women, for the first time earning
independent livelihood during the war-struggle, feel that now, at
last, they have arrived; and what have they to do with old-fashioned
behavior? More than all else, the modern economic independence of
women of good breeding and assured position, in social classes which
used to consider that only women in direst need could properly earn
money, gives a wholly different aspect to many social questions. The
tendency to individualism, so often seen in the modern woman,
unbalanced by study of the past or its lessons or by any real
grappling with present problems as they relate to possible future
adjustments, now begins its strongest revolt at the fireside and makes
the daughter often a stranger to her mother.
Only the older woman who has kept in touch not only with young life
outside her own family but with the problems that modern changes in
education, in industry, in art and literature, press upon the mind,
can understand why so many young people to-day distrust everything
that is old and welcome everything that seems new, however ancient it
may actually be. Many of the newest things proclaimed are old mistakes
of human nature revamped for a masquerade. A little study, for
example, would show many young people who think they are responding to
fresh revelation of the right relation of the sexes that they are
really coming under the spell of some ancient and discarded plan of
getting all satisfaction out of a relationship without assuming any
obligation in return.
=The Wisdom of the Ages Must be the Guide of Youth.=--There is no
chance of putting youth back into tutelage to age in any personal
relation and in the old sense. Wise older people do not wish that.
What is happening, and will be accelerated in action when the first
flush of youthful consciousness of power is a bit balanced by
knowledge of life's difficulties, is this; the wisdom of the ages, not
the wisdom of their own parents and family alone, will be available to
youth and used by youth in ever-increasing reverence. Not that some
one who has lived longer shall of right determine a young life, but
that young life shall learn more than in any past time it could do
what the experience of the race has to teach. Happy the child whose
parent can interpret this wisdom of life and happy the parent whose
child can even now see that there is wisdom from the past to
interpret.
Meanwhile, the fact that so many people marry and so many marriages
turn out happily speaks well for the wisdom of youth or else gives
testimony of the kindness of the fate that watches over lovers. We are
told that at the ages of twenty to twenty-five half of the women and
one-fourth of the men in the United States are married, and at the
period of life between thirty-five and forty-five years only seventeen
per cent. of the men are single and only eleven per cent. of the
women; while at sixty-five years and over only six per cent. of either
sex are listed as having never married. If out of this large
proportion who dare matrimony on their own motion, and often without
even the parental approbation, only one marriage out of ten to twelve
turns out so badly that the parties ask to be released from their
marriage vows, surely it argues well for independence in choosing
one's partner for one's self even if there are mishaps and disasters
for the few.
=Personal Choice in Marriage Has Now the Widest Range.=--One fact
which many overlook when making estimates of the mistakes in marriage
(and drawing therefrom dire prognostication for the future of the
family in our country) is that personal choice among a circle of
friends was not only never so free for young people but also never
able to cover so wide a range of divergent national and racial
backgrounds as in the United States. Marriages in this country often
bridge or try to bridge a chasm between centuries of social
development and continents of educational influence. It is estimated
that of the 3,424 languages and dialects spoken in the world, about
one-third, or 1,624, are spoken in some part of the American
continent. The English language is spoken by more people than use
either the German, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese,
but the 150,000,000 who thus preserve the "mother-tongue" of the early
American settlers have to come into intimate contact with those of far
different lingual background. This difference in language, which is
found so often a barrier to unity between the respective parents of
the young people who choose each other in marriage, is but a sign and
symbol of deep-seated and ineradicable divergence in family tradition,
in fashion of customary ways of living, in scale of moral values and
in personal habits. It is rather a matter for astonishment that so
many "mixed marriages" turn out well than that a minority prove
disastrous. Mixed marriages will continue and with wider range of
alignment in the future than in the past. That is inevitable with our
increased complexity of life, which brings together in school and in
labor, in social gatherings and in political association, all sorts
and conditions of men, and women. Love not only laughs at prison bars,
love scoffs at parental differences as well as at parental control.
Yet is it true that wide divergence in family background is
accountable for many of the tragedies of broken families after love
has cooled and the facts of sober obligations incurred have become
obvious.
The great social need in the United States is for means of
acquaintance and friendship for the young in lines of association in
which a safe and helpful marriage choice may be made. William Penn
said, "Never marry but for love, but see that thou lovest what is
lovely." The effort of all social arrangements for the young in
families where the elders do not try to reinstate parental control but
rather to give a chance for safeguarded independence of choice is to
bring together young people who should find, each one of them in that
group, a chosen one of the right sort. Financial capacity, mutually
congenial relatives, suitable age and similar tastes, after
acquaintance giving reasonable basis for hope for permanent agreement
in essentials, might insure suitable marriages. The many advantages of
close friendships within a group bound together by similar culture and
outlook is the real reason for "society." Often foolish in its ways
and defeating its own higher ends, it is yet a real effort to give a
new and more democratic guidance through favorable circumstances,
rather than through personal will or family rule, to the marriage
choice of youth.
The reason why one is chosen and another not is never clear to any but
the ones who make the choice. To them, indeed, it may be a mystery,
but one they are sure must have its source in the necessity of things.
To others it is often a puzzle past understanding because so many of
the friends of each of the twain "would have chosen so differently,
you know."
Something of racial need both for mixture and for persistency of type,
something of hidden demand of temperament for a complementary
personality, something of easy awakening of passion and easy holding
of attention, something of requirement for a larger sympathy than most
friends can give and the favored one seems able to supply--all these
enter into the selection of the chosen one from all the rest of one's
friends. The need is for as wide a range of personalities and for as
large a chance to make friends with the suitable and truly congenial
as can be given to youth in order that the choice may be really free
and the result happy.
=The Value of the Church in Social Life.=--In our day the best
opportunities for such a choice within social ranges most likely to
offer the right choice is found in the churches. Whatever they may
lack in power of leadership, the churches have a social activity
to-day which gives the very best opportunity to youth in its quest for
the perfect other half. It is not necessary or best to do as the
Friends have done, turn out of the communion those who "marry out of
meeting." It is not a wholesome sign when religion puts bars before
the marriage altar, for one's true mate may be found in another temple
than that in which one was consecrated in infancy. It is often the
very difference in family faith that unites two people whose religious
inheritance has slipped away from bondage and gives only a reminiscent
glow. It is, however, true that like beliefs, like forms of worship,
like use of the same tabernacle, Sunday after Sunday, which bring
parents and elders of families together, give chances for the young to
form wide and strong attachments of friendship within a circle of like
quality and tastes. In spite of the fact that many people bridge vast
social chasms with high success in a marriage venture, the majority
of happy marriages are of those who do not have to engage an outside
interpreter in order to understand each other in reaction to social
habit, ethics, and culture.
It is often made a reproach to the modern church that it is so much a
supplement of the home, so largely a social opportunity rather than a
controlling moral force. In some sense the reproach may be a just one,
but in a very real meaning of human service, the church that aids
young people to find themselves and each other in a friendly circle of
the like-minded, like-mannered, and like-spirited, within the circle
of whom a really good marriage choice may be made, can claim
recognition as of those functionaries that meet a need not met so well
by any other social agency. The straining of this point by advertised
"courting parlors" for the friendless and homeless may not be the
right thing, but what is needed is an opportunity providing the right
atmosphere and chaperonage for easier acquaintance among young people
away from home.
The sad fact that so many young men and young women never meet the
right mates in youth and marry perforce, if at all, any one that
"comes along," makes any organization that naturally and simply
enables those who need it to make acquaintance with those among whom a
congenial mate may easily be found socially useful.
Either as substitute for home surroundings or as supplement to unhappy
or inadequate family life, the church home may be a benefactor in this
direction of enabling young people to find what all need, friends and
possible chosen ones among those friends.
The prophetic mission of the church, laments an earnest reformer, is
now too much in eclipse. Perhaps so, but it may be truer to say that
the prophetic mission has now escaped all walls, even of grandest
cathedrals, and is now busy at organizing that mission into
specialties of social reform and social progress. However that may be,
the church as a home-extension meeting-place of the higher, broader,
and finer friendly association, in which all ages can come together,
in a friendly spirit and for worship of all that is lovely and of good
report;--the church as such a home-extension service has a noble place
to fill in modern life.
=Easy Divorce Does Not Lessen Marriage Responsibility.=--At any rate,
by whatever means of help, or however left to struggle alone with its
problems, the youth of to-day has taken all life's choices in its own
hands, especially the choice that puts one friend above all others and
takes the first step in the founding of a home. If any one thinks that
it is so slight a thing to do this now, since if one is not satisfied
one can get a divorce, he or she is not giving the choice a fair
chance. It must be held within the heart and purpose as a permanent
bond or the marriage will not be likely to realize its own
possibilities.
The real lover is sure that he will love forever the same. It is that
feeling that consecrates the marriage and gives most assurance of its
success. If we could get rid of romantic love we should have no good
start toward married happiness. If we got rid of the ideal of
life-long devotion we should not build the home on sure foundations.
The psychology of permanence is an essential of true marriage.
On the other hand, if we tried to put the family back into the bondage
of the old time, when youth was subject and could never exercise its
own power of choice, we should lose the one precious gift of freedom
to love, the power to find and keep one's own. If we fear the future
of the family because now the spiritual essence of marriage is
demanded, even if the form of its first enclosure prove too strait for
its growth, we cannot turn back to the harsh practice and coarse
ideals that once made all unions seem right that preserved a legal
bond and all men and women wrong-doers who sought freedom from
intolerable ills.
=New and Finer Marriage Unions.=--There is a way of life, full of
difficulties and not yet clear, a way of life that leads to such a
noble comradeship and such a type of loving union as the world could
rarely see in the older days.
Our children and our children's children will know how to use freedom
for service, and service for mutual growth, and mutual growth for
community betterment, in those "world's great bridals, chaste and
calm," which the future shall make the common glory of the home.
QUESTIONS ON FRIENDS AND THE CHOSEN ONE
1. Does youth now take its own way in choice of companionship as
never before? If so, does it mean better or worse choices in
marriage?
2. Should early marriages be encouraged? If so, how should the
social opportunity for wise choices be secured to youth? If
not, how can the social dangers of postponement of marriage be
minimized?
3. Should young people in shops and manufactories, in college, in
school, in recreation centres, and elsewhere, be guided into
social circles in which marriage choices are likely to be
wisely made? If so, how can this be done?
4. How can the disproportion in numbers of men and women in given
localities, which is an acknowledged cause of late marriages
and failure to marry at all, and which is largely due to
economic conditions, be mitigated?
5. Is the "revolt of youth," so called, a passing phase of rapid
social changes, or is it evidence that old institutions in
which the elders had superior power are becoming permanently
outgrown?