The Fact of the Family

Extract

The title I have chosen ‘for this brief essay is both comfortable and soporific. Come what may—like the earth on which we stand— by very reason of our existence, the family will always be with us. But (here’s the rub) what do you mean by family? The greatest clanger to it is perhaps our complacent disregard of its history. The popular conception of the family as an unchanging political entity is a snare as well as a delusion, for it blinds us to the possibility of another and disastrous stage in its ‘evolution.’

Already, the family is regarded by many as a quaint relic (like marr’age or Sunday worship) of the Christian era. ‘The unit of ancient society,’ in the well-known words of Sir Henry Maine, ‘was the family, of modern society the individual ‘(Ancient Law, p. 121). The movement of progressive societies has been uniform in one respect. Through all its course it has been distinguished by the gradual dissolution of family dependency and the growth of individual obligation and privilege in its place. The individual, Maine continues, is steadily substituted for the family as the unit of which civil law takes account. Professor F. G. Peabody in his brilliant book (Jesus Christ and the Social Question) comments on the fact that this substitution has been for several generations the key of English jurisprudence, philosophy and economics; and to show that this is true also of the spiritual life and thought of Protestantism h,e quotes the judgement of Hecker’s biographer that Protestantism is mainly unsocial, being an extravagant form of individualism whose Christ deals with men apart from each other, furnishing humanity with no cohesive element.