-worship, which has
been so widespread and so influential in the setting of social
customs. Ancestor-worship, with its separate family ceremonials, for
which the wife must learn her husband's family ritual, led to
child-marriage, and that in turn to the slavery of the wife not only
to the husband but to the older women of his family. Child-marriage
led also to many tragedies of racial decay before it was seen to be
inimical to strength and power of achievement. When child-marriage was
not a part of marriage customs, however, and a suitable age was
demanded, for sex-unions, ancestor-worship made the position of the
father secure. He alone could pass on the name and inheritance, the
family worship and the dutiful service of his forefathers, to the
children yet to be. The Greek poem before referred to shows in the
pathetic attempt of Electra, the loyal daughter of the slain
Agamemnon, to offer the required sacrifices at her father's grave, and
her joy that the return of the son could make such sacrifices valid
for peace of the dead and the service of the living yet to be born,
shows vividly how religion made firm and binding the father's place in
the family.

So deeply did this religious sanction of ancestor-worship affect the
social "mores" that, as is shown so clearly in Spartan history, no man
could shirk his duty of marriage and of parenthood without social
opprobrium. The well-known anecdote related by Plutarch of the youth
who, educated rigorously to show respect to the aged fathers, is
praised for flouting a grey-haired bachelor and refusing to rise and
give him a seat in the open square because, as the youth scornfully
says, "No children of yours will ever make sacrifice for his
ancestors," pictures vividly the sense of responsibility to the family
life once almost universal.

This feeling, bred by ancestor-worship, has persisted long after the
church in its various forms has superseded the ancient family worship.
We find it as late as in Colonial times in Protestant New England,
where the bachelor was fined and subjected to humiliating community
supervision and the spinster, almost unknown above twenty years of
age, if persisting in her single life was treated as an exception to
be held in social tutelage.

=The Double Standard of Morals.=--The triple bond of money, military
power, and economic supremacy, which made men masters in the family
life, made them also able to free themselves from exclusive devotion