ses (_Concluded_) 249

XXIII. The Personal Factors in Religious Education 259

XXIV. Looking to the Future 268

Suggestions for Class Work 281

A Book List 290

Index 297

CHAPTER I

AN INTERPRETATION OF THE FAMILY

Sec. 1. TAKING THE HOME IN RELIGIOUS TERMS

The ills of the modern home are symptomatic. Divorce, childless
families, irreverent children, and the decadence of the old type of
separate home life are signs of forgotten ideals, lost motives, and
insufficient purposes. Where the home is only an opportunity for
self-indulgence, it easily becomes a cheap boarding-house, a
sleeping-shelf, an implement for social advantage. While it is true that
general economic developments have effected marked changes in domestic
economy, the happiness and efficiency of the family do not depend wholly
on the parlor, the kitchen, or the clothes closet. Rather, everything
depends on whether the home and family are considered in worthy and
adequate terms.

Homes are wrecked because families refuse to take home-living in
religious terms, in social terms of sacrifice and service. In such
homes, organized and conducted to satisfy personal desires rather than
to meet social responsibilities, these desires become ends rather than
agencies and opportunities.

They who marry for lust are divorced for further lust. Selfishness, even
in its form of self-preservation, is an unstable foundation for a home.
It costs too much to maintain a home if you measure it by the personal
advantages of parents. What hope is there for useful and happy family
life if the newly wedded youth have both been educated in selfishness,
habituated to frivolous pleasures, and guided by ideals of success in
terms of garish display? Yet what definite program for any other
training does society provide? Do the schools and colleges, Sunday
schools and churches teach youth a better way? How else shall they be
trained to take the home and family in terms that will make for
happiness and usefulness? It is high time to take seriously the task of
educating people to religious efficiency in the home.

Sec. 2. THE RELIGIOUS MOTIVE

The family needs a religious motive. More potent for happiness than
courses in domestic economy will be training in sufficient d