The Decay of the Home Life
(From a recent sermon by the Right Rev. F. H. Chase, D.D., Lord Bishop of Ely, preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, London.) Are the warnings of the Bible and of history wholly without a meaning and a message to ourselves? Is it not the case that thoughtful men see reason anxiously to ask themselves the question whether in England to-day the home counts for what it used to count, whether the standard of family life is the standard it used to be? There are tokens which can not be mistaken that, whereas, if it be God's will, children are the rightful fruit of marriage, there is a growing tendency to regard a family as a burden, an avoidable curtailment of comfort and luxury and wealth, and to frustrate the clearest and plainest purposes of the Creator. Again, during the last week the newspapers have recorded a debate in the House of Lords, which is one of many indications only too obvious that divorce has a growing place in English life, and that there is a lessening of that reverence for the marriage-bond on which the wholesomeness and the soundness, and ultimately the existence, of society depend. The evidence of laxity of view and of practise in these grave matters suggests many anxious questions to a lover of his country. He can not but ask himself whether the average parent to-day has the same care for, and consequently the same authority over, his children that parents used to have; whether he is willing to practise the same self-denial for his children's sake in regard to amusement and luxury which our fathers and our grandfathers were willing to practise; whether religion is the basis and bond of English family life as it used to be half a century ago. Here are matters which are of vital importance to us all, but which in the hurry and bustle of daily life, in the excitement of political and ecclesiastical controversies, we may easily overlook and disregard. Depend upon it, in the long run the prosperity and happiness, nay, the stability, of a nation depends less, infinitely less, on the strength of its armaments or the growth of its commerce or the security of its finance or its store of scientific achievements ministering to the ease or the business of life than on the home life of its citizens. That is its citadel and its palladium. Weakness in other departments of life may be retrieved. Weakness here is like an insidious disease which, if unnoticed in its earliest stages, gathers a force too great for later remedies, and slowly and surely undermines the vitality of the strongest constitution. Perhaps the greatest of our national needs at this moment of our history is a strong, serious, watchful, Christian public opinion as15to the inviolable sacredness of the life of the home and the supreme obligation of its responsibilities and duties. To do all that in him lies to maintain and to strengthen such a sound public opinion is within the power, as it is the sacred duty, of every Christian man and woman.