niverse. Modern
interest in the material factors of life is on account of their potency
in making real selfhood; we acknowledge the importance of the physical
as the very soil in which life grows. But the fruits are more than the
soil, and a home exists for higher purposes than physical conveniences;
these are but its tools to its great end. Somehow for purposes of social
well-being we must raise our thinking of the family to the aim of the
development of efficient, rightly minded character. The family must be
seen as making spiritual persons.

Sec. 4. THE COST OF A FAMILY

Taking the home in religious terms will mean, then, conceiving it as an
institution with a religious purpose, namely, that of giving to the
world children who are adequately trained and sufficiently motived to
live the social life of good-will. The family exists to give society
developed, efficient children. It fails if it does not have a religious,
a spiritual product. It cannot succeed except by the willing
self-devotion of adult lives to this spiritual, personal purpose.

A family is the primary social organization for the elementary purpose
of breeding the species, nurturing and training the young. This is its
physiological basis. But its duties cannot be discharged on the
physiological plane alone. This elementary physiological function is
lifted to a spiritual level by the aim of character and the motive of
love. Families cannot be measured by their size; they must be measured
by the character of their products. If quality counts anywhere it counts
here, though it is well to remember that it takes some reasonable
quantity to make right quality in each.

The family needs a religious motive. It demands sacrifice. To follow
lower impulses is to invite disaster. The home breeds bitterness and
sorrow wherever men and women court for lust, marry for social standing,
and maintain an establishment only as a part of the game of social
competition. To sow the winds of passion, ease, idle luxury, pride, and
greed is to reap the whirlwind. Moreover, it is to miss the great
chance of life, the chance to find that short cut to happiness which
men call pain and suffering.

A family is humanity's great opportunity to walk the way of the cross.
Mothers know that; some fathers know it; some children grow up to learn
it. In homes where this is true, where all other aims are subordinated
to this one of making the home count for high character, to training