icy? The love of home is a human instinct. Princes
who marry for political reasons often find a second household necessary
to their happiness, although every motive of honour, policy, religion,
and patriotism makes with overwhelming force against such
irregularities; and the celibate priesthood, presumably taking its vows
freely and under the influence of religious zeal, often revert in
practice to a sort of natural marriage. It is true that Plato's citizens
were not to be celibates, and the senses would have had no just cause
for rebellion; but would the heart have been satisfied? Could passion or
habit submit to such regulation?

Even when every concession is made to the god-like simplicity and ardour
which that Platonic race was to show, a greater difficulty appears.
Apparently the guardians and auxiliaries, a small minority in the state,
were alone to submit to this regimen: the rest of the people, slaves,
tradesmen, and foreigners, were to live after their own devices and
were, we may suppose, to retain the family. So that, after all, Plato in
this matter proposes little more than what military and monastic orders
have actually done among Christians: to institute a privileged unmarried
class in the midst of an ordinary community. Such a proposal, therefore,
does not abolish the family.

[Sidenote: Opposite modern tendencies.]

Those forms of free love or facile divorce to which radical opinion and
practice incline in these days tend to transform the family without
abolishing it. Many unions might continue to be lasting, and the
children in any case would remain with one or the other parent. The
family has already suffered greater transformations than that suggested
by this sect. Polygamy persists, involving its own type of morals and
sentiment, and savage tribes show even more startling conventions. Nor
is it reasonable to dismiss all ideals but the Christian and then invoke
Christian patience to help us endure the consequent evils, which are
thus declared to be normal. No evil is normal. Of course virtue is the
cure for every abuse; but the question is the true complexion of virtue
and the regimen needful to produce it. Christianity, with its
non-political and remedial prescriptions, in the form of prayer,
penance, and patience, has left the causes of every evil untouched. It
has so truly come to call the sinner to repentance that its occupation
would be gone if once the sin could be abolished.

[Sidenote: Ind