We believe in the Holy Ghost the Lord and Giver of Life, we believe that it is in his power and under his sanction that the love of man and woman is sanctified and blessed. As of old, he says "Be fruitful and multiply." We believe that through him alone does the Christian family subsist. "Christ is the foundation of the house we raise," of the family and of the State we build for his glory and our joy.
There are four fundamental questions involved in the Christian teaching in connection with the family--(1) Sex; (2) Marriage; (3) Divorce; (4) Family Life.
Sex.--In the beginning God made them male and female, each sex with its own beauty and its own gift. God is above sex. He is self-existent and the Creator who needs no partner in his creative energies.
To his creatures he has delegated procreative power; but the man is incomplete without the woman, and the woman is incomplete without the man.
The fact of sexual differences evokes loveliness of form and colour; to it is due song, dancing, and other means of mutual attraction between male and female. It is the substratum of the graces of courtship, and the inspiration of poetry, music and all the arts.
There is nothing low or vulgar in the fact of sexual distinctions, nor is there anything wrong in sexual desires. On the contrary, God surveying his completed creation of corn, herbs and trees-his children of fish, bird, beast and man, pronounced it "very good."
The sexual instinct is God's gift; through it are the races of creation maintained each in its order and proportion. The lower orders bound fast by natural laws fulfil with joy and obedience God's intention for them. They have their seasons for mating, their ordered terms, their appointed fertility. To them instinct is the unquestioned guide and conductor to such happiness as they are formed to enjoy.
On man God conferred not only the instincts which he shares with the lower orders of creation, but also reason and self-determination. If our will were in unison with God's will, our gifts of instinct, reason and will would raise us to a higher degree of happiness than that enjoyed by our lesser brethren, but man has lost touch with God. he made us upright but we have "sought out many inventions."
The dowry of procreating power was bestowed on us for the gracious purpose of increasing mankind, and pleasure was accorded not as a necessity but as a gift. When man's will is perverted he seeks joy and comfort without their correlative obligations and burdens. He snatches at the pleasure he desires, and neglects the duty to which pleasure is attached as an incident only. Men and women plead that sexual gratification is essential to their health, and that their instincts are beyond their control. Medical evidence before the Royal Commission on Venereal Disease and before the Birth Rate Commission was that abstinence in the unmarried and self-control in the married are not injurious; that incontinence always imports a risk; and that self-control is both possible and desirable.
If instincts are uncontrollable by man with his gift of reason he would be better, safer and happier, had he been left to the guidance of instinct only.
The great uprush and overflow of sexual and procreative instinct natural to adolescence may be controlled and guided into safer channels by "sublimation," that is, by turning the exuberant vitality and procreative energy to such objects as the perfect development of the physical nature by cricket, football, hockey, golf, and other athletics, also by cultivating the children of the artistic and intellectual nature in music and poetry, in philosophy and in science. It is when the temple of our nature is empty that usurpers enter and occupy its throne.
The sex education of the young is important. It is supposed to be difficult, but all difficulty would vanish is mothers would keep open the channels between their souls and those of their children. All they need is self-knowledge, self-reverence, and self-control, a recognition of the beauty, value, and sanctity of the human body, and humble appreciation of the fact that it is "the temple of the Holy Ghost."
Marriage.-Christian marriage is the union of one man and one woman until death do them part. It consist of three parts--(1) The Contract; (2) The Sacrament; (3) Consummation.
Civil marriage consists of the contract and the consummation, it has no religious sanction and is maintained by natural nobility only.
The objects of Christian marriage are:--
1. The procreation of children.
2. The avoidance of sin.
3. Mutual comfort and support.
The abuses of matrimony, like other evils and wrong doing, are due to selfishness, to a determination to enjoy without payment. The objects sought may be, sometimes they are, good; the methods employed are usually wrong. Couples limit their families, or refuse to accept a child because they desire greater ease, less responsibility, or better opportunities for a small number of children.
At the present times the difficulties of conscientious young people are very great; incomes are small, prices are high, houses are difficult to find, landlords and employers look coldly on children, tenure of work is uncertain, domestic help is scarce, and women's burdens are excessive.
All the same, artificial contraceptives are wrong, morally ,medically, rationally. They tend to increase existing over-sexuality; they diminish natural joy and spontaneity; they injure the nervous system of husband and wife; sometimes they cause sepsis, occasionally death.
Certain natural means of spacing the family exist. Each child should be suckled by its mother; while the breasts are in vigorous function the ovaries are usually quiescent. There are times when conception is less likely to occur. The wife should claim a six months matrimonial holiday at the end of lactation. Abundant work and many congenial interests are helpful, and above all the determination to cultivate the spiritual as opposed to the exclusively material view of life.
Divorce.-Divorce is sought as a remedy for the consequences of hasty and foolish marriages, for the emancipation of couples who were from the commencement evidently unsuited to each other, and to avoid the disasters entailed by desertion, imprisonment, insanity and drunkenness.
Divorce is impossible for the practising Christian, because Christian marriage is a Sacrament which "confers character"; just as "once a Priest, always a Priest,"-so (once a father, always a father"-"once a spouse, always a spouse." If therefore one partner in a Christian marriage divorces the other partner and takes another, the second union is a civil contract, not a Christian marriage. The deserted partner, even if guilty, is badly treated by the parties to the second contract, because he or she is thereby prevented from making reparation, and is by this debarred from a full repentance.
Divorce is also a wrong to the children of the marriage who are thereby deprived of a father or a mother. This and other social aspects of the wrong done by divorce is well seen in America and Sweden where it is cheap, easy and frequent. Divorce is also abhorrent, because in Christian marriage we see the type of Christ's union with his Church and also the ecstatic union which may exist between the human soul and the Divine Lover. The practice of divorce is the negation of these unions, the murder of Christian love and joy-the ruin of the home.
A further message to Christian husbands and wives is that one heard of old-"Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages." The import of this message is too frequently misunderstood, and although parents make an honest attempt to provide their children with all that is necessary for their bodily welfare, they too frequently fail to realise their great responsibilities towards the nourishment of the moral and spiritual part of the children's nature. Indeed it would appear that the care lavished on children is distributed in inverse proportion to their real needs. Parents in too many instances, and even the State, that Super-parent, appear to consider that the important thing is to provide more or less efficiently for the children's intellectual needs but to neglect the development and education of their spirits, that part of the child's triune nature which is immortal and therefore by far the most important.
Among the queer heresies of the present time the very queerest is that which teaches that children ought not to be biased, or as they say, "prejudiced," in their spiritual outlook, and which holds that it is unfair for parents to give children definite religious instruction, because, forsooth, they say that they ought to be left to make their own choice when they come to years of discretion. Such parents and guardians are indeed biasing and prejudicing the children's choice, because it is inevitable that children left without religious instruction must grow up in the belief that the truths of religion, and the practice of religion, cannot be of much importance to their parents or they would show as much desire for their children to be instructed therein as they are anxious for them to take scholarships, to obtain good places in the public schools, and possibly to gain a cricket and football cup or a "blue" on field or river. Long before children come to years of discretion their characters have begun to form, and they are well aware of what appears to be most important in the eyes of their parents and of the educational authorities.
In this connexion we have to remember the burning question of the preservation, and, if possible, the multiplication, of our Church Schools. It is impossible for anyone to teach enthusiastically subjects in which he does not believe ex animo. Such teachers as the one who answered a small boy's inquiry as to the proof of some article of the Creed, with "you believe it if you like, I do not," is an unfit guide and a pernicious teacher. If parents understood the tremendous importance to their children of a true belief and an enthusiastic practice of religion, they would never consent to the abandonment of the Church's Schools; and more than that, if the majority of parents were truly religious, they would insist upon their children receiving proper instruction from teachers of their own faith even in the Council Schools. We are told that such an arrangement is impossible; but in this matter we want the emphatic declaration of Napoleon, who replied to a suggestion that a certain manuvre was impossible--"You must learn, Sir, that impossible is not French."
In addition to an honest and strenuous endeavour to save the Church Schools and to force the Education Department to provide that each child shall be instructed in the religion of its parents, the father and mother should be careful to provide in the home an inspiring example of Christian practice, and that best of all instruction, that which is acquired almost unconsciously in the atmosphere of the home, by intercourse with the father and mother. In this way, before the child is of school age, its mind will be stored with Bible stories, folk-lore, heroic legends both patriotic and cosmopolitan, and from the outlines of natural history it may have learnt the interesting habits and doings of plants and animals, something of the dust beneath its feet, and something of the stars above its head.
During the precious years preceding adolescence the properly brought up child will have learnt to love the great "Father of all, in every age by every clime adored"; they will have learnt their relationship to him, to their earthly parents, to their brotherhood and to their school. It is during this interval that the foundations must be laid of truth, unselfishness, and love, mischievous habits and childish errors have to be corrected, and, beyond all, to avoid the wrong talk and self indulgent habits which frequently prove to be the germs of future moral disorders.
Family life, the relationship of the social trinity, the father, mother and child, the foundation of the State and the source of Imperial greatness, is ideal and perfect in exact proportion to the recognition by its members of the in-dwelling of God, for He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him, and Love worketh no ill to his neighbour therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
Project Canterbury