The Family.
Thus far we have considered our fellow-men as units, with whom it is our
privilege and duty to come into external relations. These external
relations after all do not reach the deepest center of our lives. They
indeed bind man to man in bonds of helpfulness and service. But the two
who are thus united remain two separate selves after all. Even
friendship leaves unsatisfied yearnings, undeveloped possibilities in
human hearts. However subtle and tender the bond may be, it remains to
the last physical rather than chemical; mechanical rather than vital;
the outward attachment of mutually exclusive wholes, rather than the
inner blending of complemental elements which lose their separate
selfhood in the unity of a new and higher life. The beginning of this
true spiritual life, in which the individual loses his separate self to
find a larger and nobler self in a common good in which each individual
shares, and which none may monopolize;--the birthplace of the soul as of
the body is in the family. The nursery of virtue, the inspirer of
devotion, the teacher of self-sacrifice, the institutor of love, the
family is the foundation of all those higher and nobler qualities of
mind and heart which lift man above the level of sagacious brutes.
THE DUTY.
+The family a common good.+--Membership in the family involves the
recognition that the true life of the individual is to be found only in
union with other members; in regard for their rights; in deference to
their wishes; and in devotion to that common interest in which each
member shares. Each member must live for the sake of the whole family.
Children owe to their parents obedience, and such service as they are
able to render. Parents, on the other hand, owe to children support,
training, and an education sufficient to give them a fair start in life.
Brothers and sisters owe to each other mutual helpfulness and
protection. All joys and sorrows, all hopes and fears, all plans and
purposes should be talked over, and carried out in common. No parent
should have a plan or ambition or enthusiasm into which he does not
invite the confidence and sympathy of his child. No child should cherish
a thought or purpose or imagination which he cannot share with father or
mother. It is the duty of the parent to enter sympathetically into the
sports and recreations and studies and curiosities of the child. It is
the duty of the child to interest himself in whatever the father and
mother are doing to support the family and promote its welfare. Between
parent and child, brother and sister, there should be no secrets; no
ground on which one member lives in selfish isolation from the rest.
+The basis of right marriage.+--These relations come by nature, and we
grow into them so gradually that we are scarcely conscious of their
existence, unless we stop on purpose to think of them. Marriage, or the
foundation of a new family, however, is a step which we take for
ourselves, once for all, in the maturity of our conscious powers. To
know in advance the true from the false, the real from the artificial,
the genuine from the counterfeit, the blessed from the wretched basis of
marriage is the most important piece of information a young man or woman
can acquire. The test is simple but searching. Do you find in another,
one to whose well-being you can devote your life; one to whom you can
confide the deepest interests of your mind and heart; one whose
principles and purposes you can appreciate and respect: one in whose
image you wish your children to be born, and on the model of whose
character you wish their characters to be formed; one whose love will be
the best part of whatever prosperity, and the sufficient shield against
whatever adversity may be your common lot? Then, provided this other
soul sees a like worth in you, and cherishes a like devotion for what
you are and aim to be, marriage is not merely a duty: it is the open
door into the purest and noblest life possible to man and woman.
Complete identification and devotion, entire surrender of each to each
in mutual affection is the condition of true marriage. As "John
Halifax" says in refusing the hand of a nobleman for his daughter, "In
marriage there must be unity--one aim, one faith, one love--or the
marriage is imperfect, unholy, a mere civil contract, and no more." This
necessity of complete, undivided devotion of each to each is, as Hegel
points out, the spiritual necessity on which monogamy rests. There can
be but one complete and perfect and supreme merging of one's whole self
in the life and love of another. Marriage with two would be of necessity
marriage with none. If we apprehend the spiritual essence of marriage we
see that marriage with more than one is a contradiction in terms. It is
possible to cut one's self up into fragments, and bestow a part here and
a part there; but that is not marriage; it is mere alliance. It brings
not love and joy and peace, but hate and wretchedness and strife.
+A true marriage never can be dissolved.+--If love be present at the
beginning it will grow stronger and richer with every added year of
wedded life. How far a loveless marriage should be enforced upon
unwilling parties by the state for the benefit of society is a question
which it is foreign to our present purpose to discuss. The duty of the
individual who finds himself or herself in this dreadful condition is,
however, clear. There is generally a good deal of self-seeking on both
sides at the basis of such marriages. Getting rather than giving was the
real though often unsuspected hope that brought them together. If either
husband or wife will resolutely strive to correct the fault that is in
him or her, ceasing to demand and beginning to give unselfish affection
and genuine devotion, in almost every case, where the man is not a brute
or a sot, and the woman is not a fashion-plate or a fiend, the life of
mutual love may be awakened, and a true marriage may supersede the empty
form. Not until faithful and prolonged efforts to establish a true
marriage within the legal bonds have proved unavailing; and only where
adultery, desertion, habitual drunkenness, or gross brutality and
cruelty demonstrate the utter impossibility of a true marriage, is
husband or wife justified in seeking to escape the bond, and to revert
to the lower, individualistic type of life.
THE VIRTUE.
+In the family we are members one of another.+--The parent shows his
loyalty to the child by protecting him when he gets into trouble. The
loyal brother defends his brothers and sisters against all attacks and
insults. The loyal child refuses to do anything contrary to the known
wishes of father and mother, or anything that will reflect discredit
upon them. The loyal child cares for his parents and kindred in
misfortune and old age; ministering tenderly to their wants, and bearing
patiently their infirmities of body and of mind which are incidental to
declining powers. The loyal husband and wife trust each other implicitly
in everything; and refuse to have any confidences with others more
intimate than they have with each other. Not that the family is narrow
and exclusive. Husband and wife should each have their outside
interests, friendships, and enthusiasms. Each should rejoice in
everything which broadens, deepens, and sweetens the life of the other.
Jealousy of each other is the most deadly poison that can be introduced
into a home. It is sure and instant death to the peace and joy of
married life.
+Other relations should always be secondary and external to the primary
and inner relation of husband and wife to each other.+--It should be the
married self; the self which includes in its inmost love and confidence
husband or wife; not a detached and independent self, which goes out to
form connections and attachments in the outer world. Where this mutual
trust and confidence are loyally maintained there can be the greatest
social freedom toward other men and women and at the same time perfect
trust and devotion to each other. This, however, is a nice adjustment,
which nothing short of perfect love can make. Love makes it easily, and
as a matter of course. Loyalty is love exposed to strain, and overcoming
strain and temptation by the power which love alone can give.
THE REWARD.
+Loyalty to the family preserves and perpetuates the home.+--Home is a
place where we can rest; where we can breathe freely; where we can have
perfect trust in one another; where we can be perfectly simple,
perfectly natural, perfectly frank; where we can be ourselves; where
peace and love are supreme. "This," says John Ruskin, "is the true
nature of home--it is the place of peace; the shelter, not only from all
injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not
this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life
penetrate into it, and the unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the
outer world is allowed to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home; it
is then only a part of the outer world which you have roofed over and
lighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a
temple of the hearth watched over by household gods, before whose faces
none may come but those whom they can receive with love,--so far as it
is this, and roof and fire are types only of a nobler shade and
light,--shade as of a rock in a weary land, and light as of a Pharos on
a stormy sea; so far it vindicates the name and fulfills the praise of
home."
THE TEMPTATION.
+The individual must drop his extreme individualism when he crosses the
threshold of the home.+--The years between youth and marriage are years
of comparative independence. The young man and woman learn in these
years to take their affairs into their own hands; to direct their own
course, to do what seems right in their own eyes, and take the
consequences of wisdom or folly upon their own shoulders. This period
of independence is a valuable discipline. It develops strength and
self-reliance; it compels the youth to face the stern realities of life,
and to measure himself against the world. It helps him to appreciate
what his parents have done for him in the past, and prepares him to
appreciate a home of his own when he comes to have one. The man and
woman who have never known what it is to make their own way in the world
can never be fully confident of their own powers, and are seldom able to
appreciate fully what is done for them.
Many an exacting husband and complaining wife would have had their
querulousness and ingratitude taken out of them once for all if they
could have had a year or two of single-handed conflict with real
hardship. Independence and self-reliance are the basis of self-respect
and self-control.
At the same time this habit of independence, especially if it is
ingrained by years of single life, tends to perpetuate itself in ways
that are injurious to the highest domestic and family life. Independence
is a magnificent foundation for marriage; to carry it up above the
foundation, and build the main structure out of it, is fatal. The
insistence on rights, the urging of claims, the enforcement of private
whims and fancies, are the death of love and the destruction of the
family. Unless one is ready to give everything, asking nothing save what
love gives freely in return, marriage will prove a fountain of
bitterness rather than of sweetness; a region of storm and tempest
rather than a haven of repose. Within a bond so close and all-embracing
there is no room for the independent life of separated selves. Each must
lose self in the other; both must merge themselves in devotion to a
common good; or the bond becomes a fetter, and the home a prison. Unless
one is prepared to give all to the object of his love, duty to self, to
the object of his affections, and to the blessed state of marriage
demands that he should offer nothing, and remain outside a relation
which his whole self cannot enter. Independence outside of marriage is
respectable and honorable. Independence and self-assertion in marriage
toward husband or wife is mean and cruel. It is the attempt to partake
of that in which we refuse to participate; to claim the advantages of an
organism in which we refuse to comply with the conditions of membership.
Not admiration, nor fascination, nor sentimentality, nor flattered
vanity can bind two hearts together in life-long married happiness. For
these are all forms of self-seeking in disguise. Love alone, love that
loses self in its object; love that accepts service with gladness and
transmutes sacrifice into a joy; simple, honest, self-forgetful love
must be the light and life of marriage, or else it will speedily go out
in darkness and expire in death.
Of the deliberate seeking of external ends in marriage, such as money,
position, family connections, and the like, it ought not to be necessary
to say a word to any thoughtful person. It is the basest act of which
man or woman is capable. It is an insult to marriage; it is a mockery of
love; it is treachery and falsehood and robbery toward the person
married. It subordinates the lifelong welfare of a person to the
acquisition of material things. It introduces fraud and injustice into
the inmost center of one's life, and makes respect of self, happiness in
marriage, faith in human nature forever impossible. The deliberate
formation of a loveless marriage is a blasphemy against God, a crime
against society, a wrong to a fellow being, and a bitter and lasting
curse to one's own soul.
THE VICE OF DEFECT.
+Self-sufficiency fatal to the family.+--The shortcoming which most
frequently keeps individuals outside of the family, and keeps them
incomplete and imperfect members of the family after they enter it, is
the self-sufficiency which is induced by a life of protracted
independence. Marriage is from one point of view a sacrifice, a
giving-up. The bachelor can spend more money on himself than can the
married man who must provide for wife and children. The single woman can
give to study and music and travel an amount of time and attention which
is impossible to the wife and mother. Such a view of marriage is
supremely mean and selfish. Only a very little and sordid soul could
entertain it. There are often the best and noblest of reasons why man or
woman should remain single. It is a duty to do so rather than to marry
from any motive save purest love. Marriage, however, should be regarded
as the ideal state for every man and woman. To refuse to marry for
merely selfish reasons; or to carry over into marriage the selfish
individualistic temper, which clings so tenaciously to the little
individual self that it can never attain the larger self which comes
from real union and devotion to another--this is to sin against human
nature, and to prove one's self unworthy of membership in society's most
fundamental and sacred institution.
The child who sets his own will against his parent's, the mother who
thrusts her child out of her presence in order to pursue pleasures more
congenial than the nurture of her own offspring, the man who leaves his
family night after night to spend his evenings in the club or the
saloon, the woman who spends on dress and society the money that is
needed to relieve her husband from overwork and anxiety, and to bring up
her children in health and intelligence, do an irreparable wrong to the
family, and deal a death blow to the home.
THE VICE OF EXCESS.
+Self-obliteration robs the family of the best we have to give it.+--The
man who makes himself a slave; goes beyond his strength; denies himself
needed rest and recreation; grows prematurely old, cuts himself off from
intercourse with his fellow-men in order to secure for his family a
position or a fortune: the woman who works early and late; forgets her
music, and forsakes her favorite books; gives up friends and society;
grows anxious and careworn in order to give her sons and daughters a
better start in life than she had, are making a fatal mistake. In the
effort to provide their children with material things and intellectual
advantages they are depriving them of what even to the children is of
far more consequence--healthy, happy, cheerful, interesting,
enthusiastic parents. To their children as well as to themselves parents
owe it to be the brightest, cheeriest, heartiest, wisest, completest
persons that they are capable of being. Children also when they have
reached maturity, although they owe to their parents a reverent regard
for all reasonable desires and wishes, ought not to sacrifice
opportunities for gaining a desired education or an advantageous start
in business, merely to gratify a capricious whim or groundless
foreboding of an arbitrary and unreasoning parent. Devotion to the
family does not imply withdrawal from the world outside. The larger and
fuller one's relations to the world without, the deeper and richer ought
to be one's contribution to the family of which he is a member.
THE PENALTY.
+To have no one for whom we supremely care, and no one who cares much
for us; to have no place where we can shield ourselves from outward
opposition and inward despair; to have no larger life in which we can
merge the littleness of our solitary selves; to touch other lives only
on the surface, and to take no one to our heart;--this is the sad estate
of the man or woman who refuses to enter with whole-souled devotion into
union with another in the building of a family and a home.+--The sense
that this loneliness is chosen in fidelity to duty makes it endurable
for multitudes of noble men and women. But for the man or woman who
chooses such a life in proud self-sufficiency, for the sake of fancied
freedom and independence, it is hard to conceive what consolation can be
found. Thomas Carlyle, speaking of the joys of living in close union
with those who love us, and whom we love, says: "It is beautiful; it is
human! Man lives not otherwise, nor can live contented, anywhere or
anywhen. Isolation is the sum-total of wretchedness to man. To be cut
off, to be left solitary; to have a world alien, not your world; all a
hostile camp for you; not a home at all, of hearts and faces who are
yours, whose you are! It is the frightfullest enchantment; too truly a
work of the Evil One. To have neither superior, nor inferior, nor equal,
united manlike to you. Without father, without child, without brother.
Man knows no sadder destiny."