710 THE FAMILY 



that have brought the evils that we have noted. We will begin with 

 the introduction of Christianity into the Roman world. 



The Founder of the Christian religion threw into the minds of his 

 disciples, in response to their question about divorce, the features of 

 the ideal family in graphic outline. The chief apostolic writer dealt 

 with the subject in relation to practical questions that came up 

 bearing on the relation of individuals to each other, with little or no 

 reference to the family as an institution. The work of the early 

 church was directed to the rescue of individual men and women 

 rather than to the creation or reestablishment of a social order. The 

 rules of the early church, the canon law of following centuries, were 

 taken up with the regulation of the duties of individuals. Marriage, 

 divorce, chastity, and celibacy, and the whole round of the domestic 

 virtues were treated almost wholly from the individualistic point 

 of view. Indeed, one may go through a volume giving a digest of the 

 entire canon law of marriage and divorce without meeting with the 

 word family or its idea a single time. It is always the individual 

 that is under treatment. The same is largely true of all except the 

 more recent treatises on divorce. They scarcely mention the family. 

 For this reason and for its excessive reliance on the grammar and 

 lexicon for the interpretation of the Scriptures of the Christian 

 church the ecclesiastical literature of the divorce question is dreary 

 reading for the student of sociology who knows how profoundly this 

 and all questions of the family are at the root of sociological ques- 

 tions. And this early trend of Christianity was unwittingly acceler- 

 ated by the condition of Roman law at the time when the canon law 

 was formed. For, as Sir Henry Maine pointed out, Roman law had 

 at that time passed from the family as its unit to the individual, and 

 in its conception of social relations from status to contract. It was 

 this debased form of the Roman law that became the matrix in 

 which the canon law was molded. Thus the method of the early 

 church and the condition of the Roman law of the times combined 

 to treat domestic relations along individualistic lines with little 

 consciousness of the family and its significance. 



The social ideas of a later period emphasized this tendency. The 

 Protestant Reformation was a protest against the claims of the 

 church by an assertion of the individual. The note of Protestantism 

 is distinctly individualistic. The position of Luther on divorce was 

 a natural consequence of it. But the influence of it on the religious 

 methods of the churches that came into being as a result of the 

 Reformation contributed still more powerfully to the forces that 

 made for an individualistic conception of the social order. Then 

 the invention of printing in a degree took the power of control over 

 life away from the church and put it into the hands of every one 

 who could read. The invention of gunpowder made the individual 



