The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement. This specially dear and ancient one, however, we have successfully kept shut, and so it has not improved as have some others.
The home is too important a factor in human life to be thus left behind in the march of events; its influence is too wide, too deep, too general, for us to ignore.
Whatever else a human being has to meet and bear, he has always the home as a governing factor in the formation of character and the direction of life.
This power of home-influence we cannot fail to see, but we have bowed to it in blind idolatry as one of unmixed beneficence, instead of studying with jealous care that so large a force be wisely guided and restrained.
We have watched the rise and fall of many social institutions, we have seen them change, grow, decay, and die; we have seen them work mightily for evil--or as mightily for good; and have learned to judge and choose accordingly, to build up and to tear down for the best interests of the human race.
In very early times, when the child-mind of inexperienced man was timid, soft, and yet conservative as only the mind of children and savages can be, we regarded all institutions with devout reverence and fear.
Primitive man bowed down and fell upon his face before almost everything, whether forces of nature or of art. To worship, to enshrine, to follow blindly, was instinctive with the savage.
The civilised man has a larger outlook, a clearer, better-ordered brain. He bases reverence on knowledge, he loses fear in the light of understanding; freedom and self-government have developed him. It does not come so readily to him to fall upon his face--rather he lifts his face bravely to see and know and do. In place of the dark and cruel superstitions of old time, with the crushing weight of a strong cult of priests, we have a free and growing church, branching steadily wider as more minds differ, and coming nearer always to that final merging of religion in life which shall leave them indistinguishable. In place of the iron despotisms of old time we have a similar growth and change in governments, approaching always nearer to a fully self-governing condition. Our growth has been great, but it has been irregular and broken by strange checks and reversions; also accompanied, even in its heights, by parallel disorders difficult to account for.