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HRISTIAON THOUGHT.
CHARLES F. DEL-MS, 0.0., LL.D., Edil‘or. I

“ CHRISTIAN THOUGHT ” is the title of a Bi-Monthly Magazine, each num-
ber containing 80 pages, handsomely printed on good paper. It contains the
‘ lectures and papers read before the American Institute of Christian Phi-
.' losophy, together with other articles, the best thoughts of the best
thinkers in America, and the ablest productions of thinkers abroad,
especially such as are of permanent value and not easy of access to
American readers. Every Christian family should have it. Every Chris-
tian parent who has a son at college should send it to him. Every
clergyman should read it. Every man who desires to antagonize’ the
materialistic philosophy of the age should promote its circulation.

AMONG ITS CONTRIBUTORS ARE:
NoAH PORTER, LYMAN ABnoTT, A. 1). WHITE,
JOHN BAsooM, HENRY A. BUTTZ, NoAH K. nAvrs,
BoEIJEN P. PowNE, H. ORMUZID RASSAM, A. P. PEAIBODY,
oHAELEs A. YOUNG, JESSE B. THomAs, A. H. BRADFORD,
ALEXANDER WINCHELL, RANSOM B. wELcH, THEonoEE T. MUNGEE,
B. N. MARTIN, F. L. PATToN, JOHN F. HURST,
GEORGE '1‘. LADD, GEORGE P. PIsHEE, HOWARD CROSBY,
WILLIAM H. PLATT, PEANoIs BROWN, J’. H. EYLANoE,
EDWARD S. HAMILTON, HERRIOK JOHNSON, E. P. THWING.

The Publisher announces that the journal in its future history, as in
its past, will be acceptable to the different schools of thinkers and relig-
ionists, so far as its spirit is concerned, and the ability with which it will
be conducted.
The Editorial management will be continued absolutely by CHARLES
F. DEEMs, D.D., LL.D., the Pastor of the Church of the Strangers, New
York, and President of the American Institute of Christian Philosophy,
whose organ “ CHRISTIAN THOUGHT” will be.

The subscription for one year is TWO DOLLARS; clergymen, ONE DOLLAR
AND FIFTY CENTS; single numbers, FORTY CENTS EACH. A specimen will
be sent for TWENTY-FIVE CENTS. Remittance must be made by check on
New York, postal note, registered letter, or postal order.
WILBUR B. KETCHAM, PUBLISHER,
'78 BIBLE HOUSE, NEW YORK-




ISTORY 0F" CHRISTIANITY.
BY THE
\
‘REV. SAMUEL
ECRETARY OF THE NATIONAL DIVORCE REFORM LEAGUE AND AUTHOR‘ OF “ THE
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM OF THE COUNTRY TOWN," “THE FAMILY IN THE
WORK OF EDUCATION AND RELIGION,” “THE DIVORCE
QUEsTION,” ETC., ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK:
WILBUR B. KETCHAM,
73 BIBLE HOUSE.
[886.
THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
[A Lecture delivered before the American Institute of Christian
Philosophy, at Asbury Park, N. 1., july 27th, 1885.]
BY REV. SAMUEL W. DIKE, ROYALTON, VT.
ECENT methods of research have thrown so much new
light upon the nature of ancient institutions, and have
brought so many intimations of the early origin of those present
customs and social forms which have been regarded as almost
wholly modern, that the ﬁnality of our former conclusions on many
of these subjects is greatly distrusted. We are coming to under-
stand, to take a conspicuous example, that the most modern
forms of political institutions as they are seen in our own country,
are not altogether the new things we have imagined them to be.
We have learned that they are the slow growth and the long-
ripening fruit of a process that has been going on from the ear-
liest periods of human society.’ The customary lines of history,
it is now well known, cannot adequately explain American politi-
cal institutions. For it has been found that the latest of
political systems is largely the product of the very earliest of
political ideas subjected to a constant social fermentation, change
and recombination—all working towards more or less deﬁnite
ends.
The Family affords another instance of the new subjects
which are coming into prominence under present methods of
study. Within twenty-ﬁve years two classes of students have
given us the results of their investigations in a ﬁeld that has
much to do with the F amilyu Of the ﬁrst class Sir Henry S.
Maine is the most eminent representative. His application of
the historical method to the study of legal institutions has
already yielded much valuable knowledge in regard to the
Family. The second class is represented by such names as
Bachofen, Morgan, McLennan and Spencer, who have turned to
_ the study of the origin and growth of social institutions the
1??? till . M \/ F
I-~I5s
2 THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
methods of the evolutionary school. It is hardly too much to
say that, within the period covered by the names in these two
classes of writers, the entire problem concerning the origin,
nature, development and ﬁnal form of the Family in society has
become a new one of momentous importance‘. And this fact is
sure to lead to a repetition of the old story, in fresh and possibly
more difﬁcult form, of the conﬂict between the friends of science
and those of the Christian religion which once raged over Astron-
omy and Geology. The Church will be called upon to give up
or change its traditionary opinions, or else ﬁnd better supports
for them than it has hitherto used.
Yet certain other perils are far more to be feared. Modern in-
dustrialism, which primarily seeks an individual laborer and sub-
jects him to inﬂuences that either ignore or antagonize the Family;
Mormon polygamy coming, be it remembered, with Bible in
hand; that materialism that gravitates towards lust; the theories
and methods of individualism which are pressing earnest and sin-
ccre men and women of the times—as they call themselves—to
demand an interpretation of the idea and ofﬁces of the Family
foreign to long-accepted views—these are some of the forces that
will join in the attack upon the Family. They will make the
most of the new scientiﬁc materials to which I have alluded
and of any weak places in the Christian line of defence. For
these reasons, therefore, and for others that need not be named
here, the future work of the Church in behalf of the Family must
inevitably be a grave task of great magnitude. It becomes the
Church to study her own ground with the utmost care.
One of the subjects that l have long thought needs to be
thoroughly understood in order that the Christian Church may
be ready for its practical work is that concerning the place of the
. Family in the history of Ckrz'sz‘z'am'z‘y. And it is my chief regret
on the present occasion that circumstances beyond my control
have compelled me to give up my ﬁrst plan of treatment and be
content with a sketch of one or two points in the historical
relation of the Family and Christianity, which may, it seems to
me, need careful re-examination, adding thereto some considera-
tions on the practical bearing of its results. I do not venture to
teach you philosophy. I cannot claim to bring before you the
THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. 3
results of a scientiﬁc investigation. All I can do is to lay before
you the things I have chanced to see, and to state the questions
they have put into my own mind and, as I suspect, into the
thought of others. Instead of a lecture, I try to make an inter-
rogation point.
I. The ﬁrst thing to which I would direct attention is that of
the need of a reinvestigation of the actual relation of early
Chrz'stz'am'ly and the Family to each other. The popular opinion
on this subject is expressed in the common remark that the
Family owes everything to the Christian religion—a remark in
which the expression is generally taken almost literally. And
even if we turn to the more familiar accounts we may chance to
take up of the condition of the civilized world at the time of the
introduction of Christianity, we shall ﬁnd abundant illustrations
of this fact. The contrast between the condition of morals in the
Roman empire before Christianity affected them and the purer
morality ofthe early Christians has been shown many times. Nor
can any one doubt the immense service Christianity rendered so-
ciety in the interests of a pure home life. Probably the civilized
world has never seen before or since such deep and general deprav—
ity in domestic life as that was which confronted the Apostles and
their followers. The researches of scholars have entirely justi-
ﬁed the terrible indictment which the Apostle drew in the
Epistle to the Romans. This and the other epistles of the New
Testament, and the Christian literature of the ﬁrst centuries of
our era, also exhibit evidences of the marvellous reformation
which Christianity Wrought in the character of domestic morals.
Perhaps no one thing in the entire range of primitive Christian
achievement 'is more remarkable’. All this, I ﬁnd, is conceded
by nearly every intelligent student of those times.
But this popular impression goes farther, and here it demands
our special attention. It is based on the practical assumption
or the direct assertion that not only the domestic character, but
the domestic constitution itself underwent a complete change
at the hands of early Christianity. According to this view,
although Greece and Rome once had something like the Family
of which the book of Genesis gives us glimpses in still earlier
times, and which the Hebrew race partially preserved until the
4 THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
coming of Christ, it is very commonly assumed that certain
words of the New Testament were the seed out of which nearly
the entire domestic growth of the Christian era sprang. It has
been said repeatedly that the few words of Jesus recorded in the
Gospels on the subject of marriage and divorce have wrought
greater social changes than any other ever uttered; that He thus
turned human thought and life back to the original constitution
of the Family, which had been more or less faithfully preserved
in the Mosiac system; and that an utterly corrupt society has in
this way been recovered to the true idea and to that purer prac-
tice which, in spite of all imperfection, is the glory of Chris-
tendom.
Now I do not question the substantial truth of this picture
of the early Christian transformation of the character of the
Family. The debt of the Family to Christianity is an immense
one. But I do wish to say that the statement to which I refer
tacitly conveys more than we have a right to make it without
further proof. The particular defect of it is that it leaves the
impression—on the popular mind at least—that the work of
Christianity upon the Family was constitutional to the degree
that it amounted to a creation a’e now, and that therefore there
is little to be drawn from other than Christian sources on the
subject that is worthy our serious attention. And at this
time I wish to call attention to the possibility, and even proba-
bility, that this theory may assume that there was a complete-
ness in the early Christian conception of the Family, and in its
early Christian development, which a more careful examination
of the facts may not support.
Let us look a moment at the Family of the early Church.
If there is any one thing true beyond a doubt in regard to the
method of the founder of Christianity and of that of His immediate
followers, it is that He did not propose to begin His work with
the founding of political institutions or to enter directly and
immediately upon the reconstruction of any of those social institu-
tions that lay outside the religious societies that must necessarily
be formed. But, on the other hand, it is clear enough at the
present period in the Christian era that the kingdom of God
means ultimately the organization of all society on Christian
THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. 5
principles, or, to put the same thing in another form, the ultimate
recovery of society to its normal, that is, to its natural and
divinely intended order. This is true unless those are in the
right who think the ultimate triumph of Christianity will come
about through an overthrow of the entire social order of the
present. But that a new social system was not an object of
immediate care with the ﬁrst Christians is, as I have just said, an
undoubted fact. The constant and most positive insistance that
His kingdom was not of this world, the more than utter indiffer-
ence to political affairs and methods which they exhibited, and
their pressure of motives drawn from strictly spiritual sources
and urged in simply moral ways, clearly show the attitude of the
Christians of the ﬁrst centuries. It is one of the singular features
of early Christianity that a system which was intended to change
existing institutions more. radically and do more to bring new
institutions into being and to mould all the forms of social life
more than any other, if not all other systems put together,
should have so little to do in its beginning with their constitu-
tional forms. The recorded words of Christ say remarkably
little concerning the forms of either the Church or the Family or
the State. In each of these instances, a few comprehensive
principles for use in questions of individual duty is about all we
have. The nature of even the Family is only indirectly set forth.
The form of it given in the Gospels seems little more than
embryonic.
The moral necessity for this course has been universally per-
ceived. Men have seen the wisdom of the method that took the
early disciples away from all political and social entanglements,
and ﬁxed their attention on spiritual aims and spiritual methods.
But what I may be allowed to call the sociological necessity for it
has not been as widely understood. It has often wholly escaped
notice. Yet just here lies an important truth and one that is of
the utmost consequence to our subject. For those who are
familiar with the manner in which the earlier groups of society
were formed, tell us that the processes which we see going on
to-day in India are probably good examples‘of the way in which
the germs of political and other societies have been constantly
formed from the very ﬁrst. One man, to illustrate, possessed with
6 THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
ambition or under a conviction of some sort, generally religious,
separates from his community and gathers around him those he
can pick off from other groups one by one; or occasionally, and
in earlier times especially, he secures an entire household. Then
in course of time follow the institutions and order of a new
society, whose unique or common features depend much on the
originality and power of their underlying principles. We see
much the same thing going on in our own times and country in
the formation of religious sects—Christian and unchristian.
Mormonism may be noted as a striking illustration of the es-
sential repetition of this process. Its resemblance to the general
course of social development from its earliest beginnings in mak-
ing its individual converts, down through its construction of a
domestic system to serve its religion; to its ultimate presentation
of all the essentials of a great political organism only waiting
the opportunity of successful promise to become such in avowed
form and fact, becomes very evident when we turn to its study
with the comparative method. Some of the Christian sects of
our own day are further illustrations of this method of social
growth. In their earlier stages these have been—both from a
moral and a social necessity—protesting and separating systems.
Each one has at ﬁrst turned from old institutions to some sup-
posed or real elementary principle or principles, from organic or
social relations with other men to the individual and to the indi-
vidualistic conception of ethical relations. Differentiating princi-
ples have almost inevitably taken precedence, and co-ordinating
ideas have waited upon them. So powerfully have the former of
these operated that the adherents to the new ideas have gener-
ally been forced into the formation of new religious bodies in
spite of their early intentions to the contrary. By as much as
the new society, of whatever kind it chanced to be, has been
widely and radically different from the old order, by so much
have the protesting, the separating, the individualizing principles
had the greater inﬂuence as a practical working force. And by
so much also has it been difﬁcult for those most deeply imbued
with the spirit and traditions of the formative period in any social
system or polity, to rise to the demands of the co-ordinating and
constructive work of its later stages. Except in rare instances this
THE FAMILYIN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. 7
latter work has been left to the different minds of a more catholic
type and period. Very rarely have the two types been found
together in the men of the early stage.
It would seem, however, to be one of the great characteristics
of the founder of Christianity that He held both principles in
ﬁrm proportion in His own thought. That marvellous concep-
tion of the kingdom of God, or of a universal society of absolute
completeness, was matched with the equally wonderful apprehen-
sion of the true means of bringing it to pass through the withdrawal
of its early members from all attempts at its immediate formal
establishment. The permeation of society with the constructive
principles of the Gospel is not less remarkable than the means
taken to accomplish the object for which they were put there.
And it is here that the force of the suggestion of the need of a
careful re-examination concerning the place of the Family in
early Christianity will be felt. For the peculiar form of reverence
which Christians have been taught to cherish for the teachings
of the New Testament, may be found to have urged on a natural
disposition to assume that Christ gave more at the time, in the
way of exact precept and deﬁnite form, than a better under-
standing of His language and method will permit us to believe
to have been the case. If the early Christians generally took it
for granted that Christ gave them nothing in regard to political
institutions, modern scholarship sees in the Gospels the essentials
of all that is fundamental and best in them. The profound at-
tention recently given to the early sources of modern political
institutions and the inﬂuence of their practical development have
made the attitude of the Bible towards them far clearer. We
now know something more than we did of what the Bible aims,
and what it does not aim, to teach on the subject. But in respect
of the Family the case differs at some important points.
Political status and political duties were made for the early
Christians by circumstances with which they had little to do.
Public affairs could be readily avoided. It was the rule to con-
form as far as possible to existing laws. But with domestic life
things were in several respects different, though in some similar.
Especially were they different in that the domestic constitution
was more within their own control. Though they might not at-
8 THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
tempt to fashion the political institutions about them, they could
and did do much to shape their own domestic life. Marriage
and divorce, chastity and similar concerns of the Family, were
far more within their own control and under their own authorita-
tive rules. And this privilege was exercised in practical ways.
But at precisely this point they show the inﬂuence of the great
Christian methods which I have noted. The early Christians did
not assume to build social institutions, but gave themselves to
the work of winning individuals from their old allegiances, though
it often involved separation from their former social environment,
to an allegiance to God that was personal and which should ﬁrst
of all instill Christian principles into the minds of individual men
and women.
Accordingly, the early disciples of the new faith did not
trouble themselves much about the idea of the state and citizen-
ship as a political theory, but were chieﬂy anxious to meet
speciﬁc duties under existing governments. The government
a’e facto was always with them the government de jure. And
although, as I have said, they felt far more liberty in respect to
the Family, yet the true’ constitution of it did not occupy their
thought so much as the question how to live in its relations as
they found them. The speciﬁc relations of marriage, of divorce,
of chastity, and of parents and children were uppermost in their
minds. For these were their practical, every-day questions. Con-
sequently, where the early converts had been ﬁrst Jews or Jewish
proselytes, the Family of the Mosaic law and of Jewish tradition
was the principal material of their domestic framework. And
the words of Christ seemed to sanction this course. But if their
origin had been directly Gentile, then the Family of the Roman
world did more to supply the material form which was to be
moulded towards the Christian ideal. And then here, where the
idea of contract as the formula of marriage~—-a form which had
come into wide use in the empire—prevailed, the great stress
of the Christian instruction would be naturally laid on the
sacredness and permanency of this contract, and in teaching
ﬁdelity and purity within the relation without much attention to
its peculiar nature, just as we see it done at the present time in
similar circumstances. But wherever the older ideas of a status
THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. 9
‘still held their ground, as they undoubtedly did among some
people and in some regions, especially in the country districts
that lay remote from large cities and the great highways, Chris-
tianity must have eagerly held the higher vantage ground and
gladly lodged its principles in the better soil.
Now, if these explanations be sustained, then we can see that
we miss the mark if we look to the Scriptures and other early
Christian documents for a full and completely wrought out Chris-
tian form of the Family. The development of such an idea and
its formulation in a positive institution were foreign to the
main trend of early Christian thought. And we are also now
prepared to perceive the serious limitation to the statement that
the Family owes everything to Christianity. We may freely
acknowledge a great debt while we question the accuracy of the
common statement of its amount and form. For in order to com—
plete its representation, we must take into the account the pro-
found and extensive work which the Family itself did for Chris:
tianity. As sin did not obliterate the human soul nor extinguish
the faculties it corrupted, so ‘it was with the Family. The main
' work of the Gospel was not properly creative, but regenerative. I
In other words, it was a work of recovery in the restoration of
the essential Family that lay buried .under the hideous corrup-
tion of the times. Or to use another comparison, just as the
philosophic thought of Greece has in one form or another sup-
plied the warp, or something like it, of Christian theology and
philosophy, from which the Christian thinking of the West has al-
ways been unable to rid itself, so it has been in good degree with
the Family in the Christendom of the Western world. The
great social elements of the Aryans entered into the work'which
the early Church did in behalf of the Family. They made up a
large part of its warp. It could hardly have been otherwise.
For the ﬁrst institution in the order of social development, and
i the last wholly to give way in the decline of society from a high
civilization, is the Family. I say the last w/zolly to give way.
' Because, though decay of the Family precedes and compels po-
litical decline, yet probably long after political institutions are
generally corrupt, and even after their overthrow and after the
Family itself is widely decayed and frequently entirely rotten,
IO THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
there must still remain in such communities many families which,
though scattered and isolated from each other, and thereby put
beyond the power of effective political co-ordination, are still
available for those religious uses which precede the reconstruc-
tion of society. And we are to remember still another thing. It
is that even when the Family had lost its positive character and
its constitution was sadly broken or deranged, it was still fre-
quently capable of response to the call of the Christian faith, and
under this new appeal of religion many a member, like the bones
in the vision of the prophet, moved towards its old mate.
While, then, early Christianity undoubtedly brought’ the
spirit and principles of the Gospel, and even its underlying law,
to act powerfully in the task of restoring the true domestic order,
Aryan institutions probably supplied a good part of the material
and form of the restored household of the early centuries. Christ
gave the disciples the elements of truth concerning it and the
leading principles of reorganization, but they and their successors
were left to work out the perfected Family by an historical pro-
cess. Both the environment of Judaic society and of the Graeco-
Roman world entered effectively into the result. In this way the
debt of the Family and Christianity became mutual. Only a
careful re-study of this ﬁeld in the light of modern research and
in use of the methods applied to the study of social institutions
can disclose the amount due to each. And when this study is
made, I should not be surprised if we learned that the prepara-
tion for the Gospel that was made by the domestic institutions
of the Roman world should take high place in our regard as we
estimate the preparatory mission of ancient civilization.
This brings us to another part of the ﬁeld where a re-study of
the historic relations of the Family and Christianity may do good.
It is,
II. T he development of the Family from the times of the Afar-
ties and Fathers t0 the present. The sketch here may be made
more brieﬂy, for some of the considerations already set forth
apply to the latter period with corresponding force.
To recur to an influence already noted—the disposition of
early Christianity to make its work individual at the expense of
the social—and trace it farther down. The tendency thereby
Tl-IE FAMILY IN THE IIISTORY 0F CHRISTIANITY. II
formed perpetuated itself. It naturally grew and external con-
ditions helped on its growth. The way of looking at their work
as the plucking of brands, one by one, from the general burning,
increased among Christians until it became a ﬁxed habit, and
was easily carried over from morals to institutions. Mar-
riage was often regarded as an evil to be avoided, or at the best
anecessary form of domestic life in a world of sin whose rela-
tions were entanglements to be escaped, or, when this was im-
possible, to be reduced to the least amount. Celibacy became
common. Even the married refrained from the marital duties of
sex, and entire abstinence from them was frequently taught.
Some words of Milman are very signiﬁcant on this point : “ It is
remarkable,” he says, “ how rarely if ever (I cannot call to mind
a single instance) in the discussions of the comparative merits of
marriage and celibacy, the social advantages appear to have oc-
curred to the mind. . . . It is always argued wit/z relation to
the interests and perfection of the individual soul.” Although this
method may not have prevailed so completely as Milman asserts,
yet it apparently extended through the whole range of things
connected with the Family. It was powerfully instrumental in
building the great monastic systems of the centuries that fol-
lowed. Its one—sided effect contributed to the terrible reaction
in morals that made the corruption of some of the Christian cen-
turies scarcely less disgraceful than that of the heathenism of
former times.
The inﬂuence of the later Roman law contributed much to
the same end. We should not overlook the particular stage of
social development in the Graeco-Roman world at the time of
the introduction of Christianity and of the triumph of the latter
over the civil power, three or four centuries afterwards. The
very early Family had pretty generally disappeared, especially
from the cities. So had the tribal, and in good degree the gen-
tile domestic forms which stood next to the simple Family of earlier
times. The early city or municipality had passed from its tribal
basis of kinship through religion and ties of blood into a politi-
cal form resting far more on the theory of a collection of indivi-
du'als. Above all, the absorption of the individual by his Family
was pretty much done away. Status had loosened its grip upon
12 THE FAMILY IN THE IIISTORY 0F CHRISTIANITY.
him and contract was put in its place. By the aid of conquest
and commerce, property had almost ceased to be in the main
the corporate possession of the household and was largely held
in individual ownership. The ofﬁce of the House Father was no
longer a sacred trust. Woman had acquired great personal in—
dependence, both in respect of property and marriage. And
these radical changes in society had found their natural incor—
poration into law. When, therefore, Christianity came into a
position where it could practically inﬂuence the laws of the em-
pire, these were in a shape that gave pretty loose rein to indi-
vidualism in the Family. Its own history made it comparatively
easy for Christianity to yield to the current that ﬂowed around
it on all sides. If it did much to mould law, it is also true that
existing laws had a good deal to do with the Christian rules of
the domestic relations. There was a great deal that kept Chris-
tianity from helping raise the popular thought above the indi-
vidual to the Family as the point of view. In this way the state
of the civil law and of most social institutions gave a peculiar
set to the course which the Christianity of this period took with
the Family.
This appears in what is known as the canon law. The canon
law may be regarded, if I may so express the thought, as having
a sort of mongrel origin. Certainly at the outset, it was the re—
sult of that kind of a union which a weak and partially corrupt
Christian faith would naturally make with the peculiar civil legal
system of the times. Coming in its ethical view of the family
from debased stock on either side, it could hardly rise to the dig-
nity of those great organic principles on which the vigorous do-
mestic institutions of early Rome and Greece rested, or which a
purer faith might have drawn from a direct and more exclusive
contact with the Sacred Scriptures as its supreme authority.
But perhaps nothing has done more to determine the doctrine of
the Family in the modern Church than the canon law. For it
has crystalized and transmitted those principles and rules which
have been dominant in the Latin Church, and which have pow-
erfully impressed themselves upon all Protestant peoples as well.
Even England and other countries which have never adopted
the canon law, have not escaped its strong inﬂuence.
THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. 13
Now one has only to have his attention turned to the subject
in order to see that the canon law does not make its way through
the domestic relations on the line of the Family as its clear and
controlling idea, but that the individualistic point of view is of-
tenest taken. The title of the latest and probably best digest
of the canon law on this subject makes the book treat of the
laws of marriage and its dissolution, and this phrase without
doubt correctly describes its task. Most of the Christian and
legal discussions of the subject have similar titles, indicative of
an inherited method of the same general character. And this
method shows the usual point of observation taken by the
canon law. It is true that the idea of unity is by no means want-
ing. But like Blackstone’s unity of the common law, which he
declared made two one, and that one the husband, the oneness
of the Family in the canon law is still very nearly individual;
and it is measured chieﬂy by ‘the single being in which the wife
is swallowed up. Rarely does the conception rise to the idea of
a corporate unity larger than either of its members and some-
thing more than all of them.
The inﬂuence of Protestantism is too recent and too apparent
to need many words here. Its very beginning in the protesting
movement that gave to it its name, tended to make it at ﬁrst
individualistic and divisive, whatever may have been true of it
later. The egoistic starting-point in treating all social relations
is its easy assumption. The principle of the self-determination
of all other duties and relations is readily carried over into the
Family. Its return to primitive sources of authority and its
disposition to a reaction from catholic methods have also helped
towards the general drift now under consideration. In the form
of evangelicalism and its ultra-sectarianism, the movement away
from the conceptions represented by the Family and towards
those taking their rise in the Individual has been very marked.
For, however much we may say in behalf of those evangelical
principles and forms of Protestantism which have been the
strength of American Christianity, it seems impossible for any
one who reﬂects carefully upon their social operation to escape
the conviction that they have unconsciously had great inﬂuence
on the popular mind in its solution of practical questions con-
14 THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
cerning the Family. A Christianity that has taught individual
responsibility with untiring persistence,and that has concentrated
its force upon the individual as almost the entire beginning,
middle and end of its efforts, has had small inducement to look
upon the affairs and relations within the household from any
other than its accustomed point of view. The modern Church
makes a great deal of the congregation and its separate mem-
bers, but relatively it suppresses the Family as a factor in relig-
ious work. A study of the social causes that gave the early
churches their peculiar bent in this use of the congregation and
of the means by which this inclination has been repeated and car-
ried down in the work of American churches will, I am conﬁdent,
throw much light upon the peculiar weakness of the Family in
their work, but I cannot do more than refer to it now.* Recent
methods in Sunday-schools, Christian Associations, Women’s
societies, and other rapidly multiplying devices for doing Chris-
tian work, are further instances of the tendencies of this, kind.
The principle underlying them is that of substituting more or less
artiﬁcial collections of individuals in place of the natural Family ;
and their incidental, if not their direct, effect has been to turn
thought and effort away from this great natural instrument of
religion. But it is aside from the proper course of this lecture to
do more than make allusion to them.
III. Let us now turn to some practical hearings of this study,
which I have tried to show is necessary to a better understand-
ing of the historic relations of the Family and Christianity to one
another. We shall thus feel more deeply its importance. For
it concerns practical issues far more than we may at ﬁrst be
disposed to think.
In the ﬁrst place, the ascertainment of the true ‘historical re-
lation of Christianity and the Family to each other will prepare
us to meet certain scientiﬁc difﬁculties successfully. All intel-
ligent readers are aware that there are serious objections made
to the commonly accepted scriptural account of the Family on
the ground that recent studies of social institutions have com-
pelled many to entirely new conclusions about them. Whatever
"‘ I have, however, attempted this study in an article printed in the Andowr Re-
view for September, 1885.
THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. I5‘
may be our caution in respect to these claims in behalf of evolu-
tionary theories of society, we must all admit that the subject is
fairly before us and demands candid attention. And if it should
become evident from this class of studies—and I do not, let it
be understood, mean to say here that it will or will not—but if it
should become evident that the Bible does not contain an infal-
lible history and doctrine of social institutions, but only comes to
us making use of them as it found them and giving us received
accounts of their origin, yet dropping into them—especially in
the New Testament--its great principles and allowing these to
germinate and develop in the soil where they fell and under the
climate where they were sown, the course of Christian apology
will be very different from what it otherwise would be. If the
Sacred Scriptures simply contain the history of a partial revela-
tion of the Divine thought in domestic or other social institu-
tions, together with such authoritative principles as the exigen-
cies of that revelation require, no prudent man will throw away
his Bible because it falls below his scientiﬁc knowledge on this
subject, and no Christian need distrust social science because it
asks him to accept more than his Bible has revealed on it.
But secondly, and more to our practical need. The study for
which this paper is a plea would seem necessary to put Christi-
anity in a true attitude towards some practical questions intimately
connected with the Family. The apologetic difﬁculties are, after
all, of less concern than the problems which actual life presents.
And it would be Well for us if we could bring Christians to a per-
ception of the place the Family really holds in the solution of
some of the most important questions of the day. For these are
too serious to permit Christianity to approach them while loaded
down with needless burdens—or restrained from her greatest
freedom of action. Let me, then, enforce my general position
by referring to some of them. For convenience, they may be
divided into two classes.
The ﬁrst includes several practical problems now before our
country awaiting solution, and which, when pushed to their ulti-
mate supports, will turn on the answer we give to the question:
What is the essential constitution of the Family? Take the sub-
ject of Divorce, or as it is commonly thought of, the dissolution
16 THE FAMILYIN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
of the marriage relation, for one cause or another, prior to the
death of one of the parties to it. Now all good thinking on this
subject soon comes to the inquiry into the nature of what is be-
fore us which we propose to dissolve. That inquiry leads us to
ask—What is marriage that brought about the original con-
dition with which Divorce is to deal? Is marriage a contract
and nothing more? Is it simply a contract of a peculiar kind
and order? Is it a status .? And if so, what sort of a status?
Who control its origin and being, and how far? Has it unity?
If so, what is this unity? Does this unity absorb one of the
parties to it in the person of the other, so that the personality of
the latter stands for the old personalities of the two? And
further, is there an organic unity at all? And if this be ad-
mitted, does it or does it not constitute a something more than
either one of the two parties—something more than the
sum of the two? And once more, may this unity growing
out of marriage be regarded as a moral person and treated po-
litically as such, having duties and rights to be discovered and
maintained and becoming the subject of rewards and penalties
which shall be bestowed according as it shall be true or false
to its own being and its own moral consciousness? No one
thinks long on the subject of Divorce without perceiving that it
is inseparably connected with that of marriage ; and no one long
continues reﬂection upon the two without coming to see that
the fundamental inquiry of all is into the nature of the Family.
The most serious part also of the hotly disputed English ques-
tion of marriage with a deceased wife’s sister derives its chief
importance from its bearing upon the problem of the Family.*
Mormon Polygamy is another example. For when we go
beyond the popular statements on this subject, which have been
made as if they were mere truisms, and try to show just wherein
the polygamous family is constitutionally wrong and claim that
monogamy only is to be tolerated in a free Republic based on
natural institutions and rights, we shall ﬁnd ourselves confront—
ing this one great question concerning the real nature of the
* The able and suggestive little book of the Rev. Dr. Geo. Z. Gray, Dean of the
Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., entitled “ Husband and Viife,” illus-
trates what I have said above.
THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. I7
Family. And, indeed, this essential question meets ‘us all the
way from Maine to California; and, I may add, from the Lakes
to the Gulf of Mexico. We must have a doctrine of the Family
that will stand in both Utah and Connecticut; in New Hamp-
shire and Indiana; in Salt Lake City, Chicago and Boston. It
will prove a blessing in the end if we shall discover that our doc-
trine of the Family formulated for use in Utah cuts under the
loose divorce laws of the States and Territories. And I some-
times think that the jugglery which the Mormons practise with
the biblical doctrine of the Family may have closer relations
with the cramped ideas of some of the Christian theories of it
than we suspect. The Mormon method of interpretation of
Scripture is a familiar one. These are of the class of questions
that raise directly the theory of the Family.
The other class of problems which I have in mind demands a
true Family and a clear consciousness of it in the popular mind
for their best solution. In the former class the idea of theory is
directly raised as fundamental to the very question at issue.
But in the latter, it is only implied that we have a sound theory
somewhere ready for practical use, though it lie far back of the
actual problem before us at any given time. But here the range
of subjects is so large that I must simply point to a few of the
leading ones and then take up a single one of them for illustra-
tion. Among them may be named that of the extension of the
suffrage to woman, of her absolute equality with man in respect
to the ownership and disposition of property, of the more strictly
industrial problems—such as affect the employment of women
and children, and the inﬂuence of the competitive system on the
home—of the objects, methods and ends of education, of the
view that we take of chastity and the evils of licentiousness and
our methods in their reform and, most fundamental and far-
reaching of all, of the place to be given to the Family in the
practical work of the Christian religion. In every one of these
directions we need back of all our work, the most thorough and
comprehensive understanding of the Family, both in respect of
its nature and resources. I will select, however, for our present
purpose a single subject, and that shall be the problem of mod-
ern property. It can be touched here very lightly.
18 THE FA MIL Y IN THE HIS TOR Y 0F CHRISTIANITY.
A recent article,* based on the returns of the census, shows
that in the ten years between 1870 and 1880, the number of
children receiving wages in the United States had “increased 66
per cent, and that in face of an admittedly defective enumera-
tion.” The writer of it says, “ In mechanical and manufacturing
industries alone the increase was 59 per cent, while the labor of
males over 16 years made an advance of only 43 per cent; and
that of females over 15 years, 64 per cent.” Those of us who are
accustomed to regard the wide opening of employments to
women as of so great good as to be everywhere and always en-
couraged do not, it seems to me, reﬂect sufﬁciently on its remote
causes and their effects. This remarkable increase of labor for
wages among women and young children, and that steady move-
ment which, at Lowell and other centres of manufacture, has
supplanted the intelligent women of the old New England
stock—ﬁrst with the Irish and then with the French Canadian,
and which would, if it could do so to advantage, put the Chinese
in the places of the latter, have causes which appear to me to be
quite as powerful as those moral agencies which we usually, and
sometimes rather boastfully set forth in behalf of the industrial
rights of women. The operation of the demands of capital upon
industry is powerfully individualistic as respects the Family.
Capital wants a laborer at smallest cost to itself where cost is
compared simply with the work done. The individual without
a family competes with the head of a large family, crowding the
latter to the wall. For the tendency is to compel the head of a
household to make an industrial unit of each member of his family,
or else suffer in the competition ; and, indeed, he must often
suffer even after this expedient. Mr. Crowell, the writer whom
I have just quoted, clearly perceives the character of the evil he
' sets forth when he calls this “the play of silently working forces
which are daily resolving the adverse interests of industrial life
more and more into a treacherous struggle of the factory versus
the Family.” For I would say with all the emphasis of long set-
tled conviction that it is the Family that feels the heaviest grind—
ing of the industrial movements of the times. What is called
"' In the Antler/er Review for july, 1885.
THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. 19
the socialistic problem is, I am compelled to believe, linked with
the domestic problem far more closely than either of the parties
to the former have generally acknowledged. The right of the
Family to its integrity, both in its being and labor, and to its
freest development amid the largest opportunities, must be as-
serted against all industrial tendencies to the contrary, or soci-
ety is imperilled at its foundation and labor and capital lose the
truest, the most nearly universal and most powerful incentives
they have—the motives of the home. Looking, then, at the in-
dustrial problem in its present practical aspects simply, a good
understanding of the nature of the Family and its rights, respect-
ing both the ends of personality and property, is indispensable
to its solution.
But there is another point of view which should be taken be—
fore we can claim to fairly understand this economic question.
Most accounts of socialism begin with it as a practical fact and
make little account of the historic forces that are far behind its
expression in concrete form. But on reﬂection this, I am sure,
will seem to many as unsatisfactory as would be the attempt to
get at the inner working and true signiﬁcance of our political in-
stitutions without carefully investigating their English, Germanic
and Grmco-Roman sources—in short, without discovering some—
thing of the contributions of both the Aryan and Semitic races
to them. For American economic problems are in part an heri-
tage from the earliest times; and nothing short of a study of the
mutual relations of Property and the Family from the dawn of
history, and of the effect of these relations in bringing about the
conditions underlying socialism, and which have done much to
make socialism possible, can adequately furnish us for the work
its presence brings. The process by which property has passed
from being largely the corporate possession of the household to
the exclusive ownership of the individual members of it and
under which the control of the Father has been transformed from
a trust to a personal right, should be understood. The origin
and rise of market price and its steady growth into the place
custom once held in ﬁxing the basis of exchanges, the growth
and social signiﬁcance of competition historically treated, the
rise and early function of the Will and the laws of Inheritance,
20 TIIE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
and that whole range of inﬂuences in the realms of economics
and law by which the Family has been changed from a corpor-
ate institution, comprehending within itself nearly all the inter-
ests of its members, to what seems almost a new association for
those ends which are limited by the demands of physical sex
alone, and thus to the merest fragments of its early uses and of
the life once concentrated within it—these are all to be taken
into any complete understanding of modern socialism. Historic
socialism is the thin end of the wedge. The long butt of this
wedge, the impelling force it communicates and the causes that
have opened the seam into which the edge is set, must be
counted among the elements of the problem socialism presents
to us. Socialism, in other words, is simply one expression in a
particular concrete form of the vast question which modern
wealth has brought to the surface. And with the larger ques-
tion it involves immense changes in the mutual relations of
Property and the Family which cannot be neglected by the
student of modern economic subjects.
Now, two things make the speedy and diligent investigation
of the Christian treatment and doctrine of the Family necessary
to the solution of this question. ()ne is that we must have a
Christian theory of the Family that will meet every scientiﬁc
and practical test that may be applied to the Family as a work-
ing factor in the solution of the economic difﬁculties that meet
us on every hand. The other is the fact that neither economic
science nor the practical operation of the forces it treats, nor of
socialism in its ordinary methods, have the disposition or the
ability to give us that true Family which is the postulate of a
successful solution of their problems. For it is only when econ-
omic science and the truths that underlie the theories of social-
ism have learned their own place and have been taught to serve
in the ranks of the sciences and arts of living where they have
been frequently disposed to rule, that they really come to know
anything of the Family and its functions in industrial affairs.
The uncontrolled tendency of strict political economy, in the
familiar acceptation of the narrowest idea of it, is divisive in re-
spect to the unity of the Family; for it is individualistic both in
concept and method. The purely economic corporation of mod-
THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. 21
em times tends of itself to loosen the bonds of all corporations
in which the dominant force is personal rather than material.
That commercial spirit which is steadily reducing the national
control overa man and making every human being a cosmopol-
itan in spite of his own exertions to the contrary, is not sparing
the Family, which is the embryo of the Nation and continues to
make up the primary cells of every highly developed national
organism. The truth is that its work on the Family began be-
fore a true Nation existed and went far towards making this
Nation possible. For it is through the surrender of many of the
economic and other functions of the Family to the larger social
forms that these latter have grown into the modern State. And
it is our great task now to determine the limitations of this move-
ment and readjust relations within it. A social science that
comprehends political economy, rightly understood as one of its
departments, and which does not surrender to the claims of the
latter to be the whole science of living, can and must do the
work of giving the people of our country a true Family, which
shall be conscious of its own being and duties and rights, and ca-
pable of an intelligent maintenance of its own high place in the
work which the great coming contest over material wealth will
have for a true Family to do. And a Christian philosophy which
shall, like its master, be born of God into the.Families of the
country—itself a Divine incarnation and so bound to grow into
all the wisdom of Heaven and Earth, is the best inspiration and
the safest guide to the science that shall successfully grapple with
this single one of the social problems which I have used to enforce
my point.
A similar exposition might be given concerning the other sub-
jects to which reference has been made. But time forbids, and it is
hardly necessary to do so. Any one who will distinctly raise in
his own thinking the question as to the part the Family must
perform in the solution of any one of them, especially if he will
look into their historical relations with the Family, cannot fail
to come to a conviction of the high place this institution must
occupy in the tasks they set before us.
I have said, in substance, that for its great work in these di-
rections Christianity should come forward with a true Family
22 THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
that has been made conscious of its nature and calling; that it
should press this Family into the ﬁeld of its duties prepared to
claim its rights in order that it may attain its highest usefulness;
and that it should thereby work out its own freedom as well as
the deliverance of man from the bondage of sheer individualism.
This is one part of the alternative, and it is based on the assump-
tion of the triumph of a Christian civilization. But the other
part of the alternative must be recognized. And that part is
found in the opinion that the drift of the times hitherto has been
wholly in the right direction and needs no fundamental correc-
tion. But to accept this as true implies that the Family must
yield more and more to the forces that work for its general dis-
integration. Some of its sincere friends already speak of the
Family as being simply a modus r/iz/ena’i in a way that carries
with it evidence of their general satisfaction with things as they
are. Shall capital and labor, commerce, the movement in the in-
terests of woman, education, politics, practical religion, one and
all go on in their present course until the Family shall not be
even this for the many, but rather the accident of the few? Is
that powerful, continuous movement by which the individual is
being differentiated out from the Family in economics, law,
ethics and politics and massed in the largest collections possible
at the expense of all smaller social groups, entirely a right one ?
()r on the other hand, is this individuating process a part of, and
preliminary to, a better, more harmonious reintegration which is
already begun here and there, but which needs to be made gen-
eral and powerfully increased ? And has the time come which,
by its very stress, points to the constructive work Society may do
after its long encouragement of separative tendencies ?
Thus, it seems to me, the most serious thought of the Amer-
ican people vibrates, though it may be more or less uncon-
sciously, back and forth, waiting for more light and stronger as-
surances before it moves forward to its heartiest and best work. I
have accomplished one part of my present purpose if I have done
something to show that there is probability that from the ear-
liest days of the Church down to the present time Christianity
itself has experienced similar difﬁculties in‘ its own more distinc—
tive ﬁeld, difﬁculties produced partly by its own exigencies and
THE FAMILY IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. 23
in part due to the environment in which it has wrought. And
the other part of my aim is secured if I have shown that there is
presumptive evidence enough in this direction to call for a re-ex-
amination of the common account of the historic relations of the
Family and Christianity to each other for the sake of learning
just how much has been done for the Family and of getting a
better idea of what remains to be done. It is the conviction that
I have of the great part the Family must necessarily take in the
future work of society, together with the equally strong convic-
tion that Christianity must guide the Family to its best work,
and the serious question as to whether or not Christianity has yet
fully possessed itself of the historical facts concerning the Family
and her own relation to it, that have led me to try in this way to
raise the question of the need of reinvestigation. It has seemed
to me possible that, by taking the Family for our working line
and using the light that the historical and comparative methods
have put into our hands in recent years, the old ﬁeld of Christian
history may still yield rich treasures. I raise the question. Other
and competent minds must be depended upon to give the answer
to it. The question undoubtedly has support in the methods of
recent historical research, and it cannot long go unanswered.
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