The family is in process of change. We should fix attention on the kind of change that is desirable. The change desirable is the more perfect expression of the ethical ideal in the life of the family. One striking fact is that in the past the family was never supposed to exist merely for the “benefit” of its individual members. The latter view is an individualistic novelty of our age, and, as commonly understood, it is radically false.  
Under the caste system the family subordinates the welfare of its members to the function of the caste. Society being stationary and stratified, the family is the organ for the reproduction of a stratified social system.
 
A similar view prevails under feudalism. We of today resent the idea underlying primogeniture. From the modern point of view we ask why the eldest born should be preferred to his brothers. Primogeniture appears to us to assert the inequality of individual men; but from the feudal point of view the eldest born was preferred, not as an individual, but as the steward of the family property. The family had a fixed place in the social hierarchy, and to maintain this place the estate was to remain undivided in the hands of one person.
 
Now what is amiss with the modern family? This is profoundly amiss—that the idea of the family as serv250ing a larger purpose is disappearing, and that the family is supposed to exist for the benefit of its individual members, benefit meaning happiness. Frequent divorce and disintegration are the natural consequences of this view, for if the tie exists solely for the happiness of those bound by it, then it ought indeed to be dissolved when the relation entails suffering.
 
Society has passed from status to contract, and many seem to hold that contract is the last word, the true expression of freedom. We have passed from status to contract, we must pass on from contract to organization, and thus to true freedom.
 
Status is based on the analogy of the animal organism. The caste society and the feudal society, ethically regarded, are spurious organisms. This spurious type of organization is no longer viable, and now bald individualism is taking its place. The malady with which the family is afflicted is individualism. The desirable change is genuine organization on the basis of the spiritual equivalence of all functions.72 The relation of the family to the general social task of organization is two-fold. The family is the seminary in which shall be implanted the germinal principle of organization, that principle which is destined to transform all the subsequent terms of the social series, the instrumentality to be employed being the three-fold reverence. Again, the family will reach its more perfect form in proportion as the succeeding social institutions, the school, vocation, state,251 shall themselves be essentially organized, the influence of the later terms retroacting on the first term.
 
The family, in the spiritual view of it which I am sketching, differs from the family of other days, and also from the modern family, in two particulars. It does not recruit some one social class or stratum. It does not direct the offspring into a single specific vocation. It is the vestibule that leads into all the different professions and vocations. And secondly, the family does not prepare the young to enter into a vocation for the purpose of securing happiness. It does not regard the vocation as servile to the empirical ends of the individual, but as a phase through which he is to pass on the road toward ethical personality, the fulfilment of the objective aims of the vocation being the means of acquiring the ethical development which the vocation is competent to furnish. Thus we regain, but on a much higher plane, what the family possessed before it began to break down under the influence of modern individualism, namely, an ulterior greater purpose imbedded within itself and yet extending beyond itself.
 
When we have grasped this relation of the family to the subsequent terms of the social series, and bear constantly in mind as we should that the three-fold reverence is the instrument by which organization is to be effected, we shall then be able to give adequate reasons why the monogamic ideal alone is the true ethical ideal, why the marriage relation, if it is to be ethical, must be permanent between two and exclusive of all others.
 
Let me briefly point out the relation of the monogamic family to the three types of reverence. The252 third type ranks highest. The tie of consanguinity between parents and offspring supplies the empirical substratum. To be interested in the undeveloped, to surmise possibilities as yet wholly unapparent, to go to infinite pains to nurture and educate an immature being like a child, for all this natural affection is almost indispensable. As a rule no one can so love a child as its own parents do. The plan of state education for infants to replace home education is advocated by some on the ground that professional kindergartners and teachers are more competent to train the budding human mind than unpedagogical fathers and mothers. The function to be performed by the scientific educator in co-operation with the home is doubtless not to be missed; but taking children away from under the care of their parents, assembling them in what would be equivalent to state orphan asylums, is a procedure which precisely for pedagogical reasons would be preposterous. For the parent supplies that concentrated love for the individual child, that intimate cherishing which the most generous teacher, whose affections are necessarily distributed over many, can never give. And the child needs this selective affection. The love of the parent is the warm nest for the fledgling spirit of the child. To be at home in this strange world the young being with no claims as yet on the score of usefulness to society or of merit of any kind, must find somewhere a place where it is welcomed without regard to usefulness or merit. And it is the love of the parents that makes the home, and it is his own home that makes the child at home in the world.
 
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It does not follow that parents in general do reverence the spiritual possibilities latent in their children. The natural affection is there, but the empirical substratum and the spiritual relation are not to be confounded. The kind of reverence of which I speak is an ideal thing to be worked towards, not something that as yet actually exists, save in exceptional cases. In the caste family and the feudal family the father incarnated, as it were, the social system so far as that stratum or class was concerned to which he belonged. He inspired awe. He demanded implicit obedience. It was the existing social system that spoke from his lips. But this system itself had an arbitrary character, and the worship of the father was hardly ethical. The modern family goes to the opposite extreme. In it the relations between parents and children are loose, and tend to become more and more so. Reverence is scarcely looked for by the parent, and is not likely to be accorded. On the individualistic theory the child at a very early age is treated as an equal, and whether encouraged to do so or not is apt to assert its independence. The members of the family are not joined in an organic connection, but resemble a collection of atomic units that easily fall apart. The ethical relation, the real reverence must spring from the service the parent renders in bringing to light the specific individuality of the child with an eye to the transmutation which it is to receive in the later terms of the social series. Not only highest gratitude but genuine reverence are due to the parent who performs this office.254 “You have given me physical birth, you are now giving me spiritual birth,” will be the child’s response to the parent’s efforts.
 
Thus much may be said as to the reason why the marriage ............