The importance of the Christian family as the corner-stone of any social rebuilding in the future is recognised by all; and Blackfriars cannot hope to do more than produce a few pointers to some of the more significant elements in its constitution. Thus we may note the vocation of marriage. For Christian marriage, no less than the religious life or the priesthood, is a ‘calling,’ a divine calling to specific functions, responsibilities and joys. Indeed, it involves the spirit of a religious vocation, since it involves the spirit of the three vows of religion. Married life usually implies a greater degree of actual poverty than living single, and must always mean a certain detachment from wealth and possessions. In this it stands out against the standards of those whose ideal of conjugal happiness is summed up in a service flat and a car. Married life demands a chastity that is constantly selfless in face of the selfish way out by birth prevention. It requires obedience, without which the family collapses in a chaotic group of warring relatives. All this necessarily implies sacrifice. The poverty, chastity and obedience of marriage are consecrated in a special way by the sacrament, which links them with Calvary : every sacrament represents the Passion of Christ. By his analogy between the union of the Church with Christ and that of husband with wife St. Paul shows how central this sacrificial element must be, for Christ was wedded to his Church on Calvary. In these days it might perhaps prove more helpful to insist on this aspect of married life rather than on the union of married love or the importance of children as its primary end. These latter are the natural elements of the marriage bond, whereas the sacrificial, and sometimes heroic, element should be essentially supernatural.

God is love. God is creator, God’s creation is the expression of his love.

Man is created in the image and likeness of God. Man too is lover and creator. But for him, to love and to create is hard.

It is hard to love, because so often when he sees a beautiful thing man wants to clutch at it, possess it, dominate, domineer, use it for himself, destroy it.

It is hard to create, because creation comes only from love.

There is no love and no creation without worship and humility and fear; and in order that we may have these things God takes us by the hand, and leads us to the trackless and waterless, places, and gives us the gift of pain.

Man’s destiny is to create, in the image and likeness of God. We are not men and women unless we are makers, whether what we make be ships or sealing wax or cabbages or kingdoms. But for most men and women the primary creation is procreation; the primary work of art is married life. God gives us in each case the ecstasy of creation : the joy that follows the agony of making, the joy that follows the anguish of child-bearing. If we had only these gifts of joy and ecstasy we might forget the giver, and rest in the gifts and regard them as our own possession; we might cease to love and worship, and become beasts of prey. Love is worship. ‘With my body I thee worship ‘; the body conveys the message, but it is the whole I that worships, the whole of the body and its deepest roots, the whole of the spirit and its deepest roots, in one act of recognition and acceptance of oneness, of adoration and offering.

Not men alone, but all human institutions, customs and habits of life partake of the effects of Christ’s Redemption, and receive after their own manner a supernatural character. Man has a purpose in this life which transcends the boundaries of this earth, he is a child of God in no metaphorical sense, and his worldly business participates in his heavenly life in so far as it is the means of his attaining his supernatural end. The commonest failing among-Christians ‘S to put on one side our divine sonship and to be content with the earth and what it alone has to offer. Materialism means recognising only matter and the power of matter, and putting aside the spirit. Christians acquiesce in materialism when they put aside the ‘higher things.’ as they are often vaguely called, and are content to live in this world for the sake of making money, living comfortable lives.

In a world which appears to recognise only money, arms, and strength as symbols of the right, we can still find men appealing for the restoration of what they call the more human or homely things, the restoration of the rights of the working man, of family life, and of Christian love. The grounds on which they base their appeal are usually that this is a more human condition of life, and men will therefore be happier when it has been reinstated. The defence of family life is most commonly set out in this way. But family life will not be restored by telling people that it will make them happy; many of them know, or think they know, that they are perfectly happy without family life, and in fact find themselves much more comfortable without the burdens of a wife and children.

Whether we deplore it, or welcome it as a deliverance, it is a fact beyond controversy that parental authority has decreased in the last fifty years, and. that this has been accompanied by a decline in family discipline. The battle is joined, but the issue is still in doubt, between those who see in this a breakdown of the family group pattern, and those who believe that the development of the psychologists’ ‘free’ child is the forerunner of a new age of enlightenment, a new family relationship of pure love—although, apparently, the obligations in this new relationship are entirely material ones and entirely onesided. It may not be inappropriate in a number of Blackfriars devoted to the Family to glance briefly at some of the implications of this phenomenon.

When seen against its historical background the first thing to strike the observer is that this decline is not an isolated fact, but that it appears to be bound up with a general decline of the concept of authority, and a growing tendency to pragmatic thought. Sovereignty is no longer looked upon as delegated by God, but as residing in the group, whether this group is defined as an individual group, or an ideal group ol humanity to which all subordinate groups owe allegiance, and with reference to which their separate authorities are limited. The parent has progressively, during the last half-century, come to doubt his ‘right’ to exercise discipline, has forgotten the real source of his authority, and has accepted more and more State interference. The rapid contemporary advance in Social Services, excellent in so many ways, has often undermined ‘the parents’ sense of responsibility, and narrowed the field of their authority, still further. Moreover, once the origin of that authority nad become obscure, the mother, and to a lesser degree the father, became an easy prey to the popular versions of current psychology.

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.

The family depends on two people, a man and a woman. It is probable, in our present pattern of culture, that they marry because they fall in love with one another, wish to spend their lives together, and consciously or unconsciously desire children. Before marriage, each is likely to be a self-supporting adult individual, earning and laying out money at his or her own discretion ; rooted in his or her own nationality ; a citizen able to subscribe to the funds of whatever political party he or she thinks likely to bring about the public good; a worker contributing in the vast majority of cases to the national health insurance scheme, with a call on the services of a doctor if he is ill; a person able to give to personal relationships the un-self-conscious love, co-operation, sympathy, respect and self-respect of a responsible and independent human being.

After marriage, however, everything changes; and most vividly of all, the economic position. If there are to be children, the personal relationship between two equal, different and delighted selves has to be run very awkwardly in double harness with an economic relationship of absolute power on the one side and utter dependence on the other. It should be said at once that this relationship has not always been a result of marriage. It has grown up since the Industrial Revblution, which had two evil consequences for married women. The first was the development of a habit of regarding work not as a means of getting things done—houses built, children clothed, food grown—but as a method of getting money ; so that its worth came to be assessed not in terms of achievement, but in terms of-ex-’ change.

The question is sometimes asked : Are there any married saints? Of course we all know there have been many married saints who died as martyrs; many who lived virginal lives in holy wedlock after the example of our Lady and St. Joseph; many who attained to heroic sanctity in widowhood; many who made a compact of continence after some years of marriage; and lastly there have been many married saints who mutually agreed to separate and serve God for the rest of their days in sanctuary or cloister. But all these categories are here excluded, and an attempt is made to show from hagiography that quite a numerous body of saints can be found who served God in the married state until their death, and lived lives of heroic sanctity, without surrendering the rights and responsibilities of parenthood.

Practically all the Old Testament saints fulfilled these conditions, and amongst those married to one wife we may instance Isaac, Joseph the Chaste and Moses, whilst of holy wives we cannot find a better example than the chaste Susanna. Verging on the New Law we have our Lady’s holy parents Joachim and Anna, and Zachafy and Elizabeth, parents of the Baptist.

Of the many married Christians who became disciples of the Apostles, St. Paul singles out St. Aquila and his wife, St. Priscilla, for special mention three times in his Epistles, whilst St. Luke speaks of them three times in the Acts of the Apostles. They were not martyrs, although they suffered much for the faith, having been exiled from Rome on that account. They died according to the Roman Martyrology in Asia Minor and their combined feast falls on July 8th.