THE EVOLUTION OF A FATHER. 315 



merits given them in one way, they cannot grudge 

 that the world's earlier children should have been 

 given their two or three commandments in another 

 way another way which, nevertheless, did we know 

 all, might turn out to be but another phase of the 

 same way. But it is impossible even to approach the 

 Evolution of Morality until we have carried Man some 

 stages further up his Ascent. It is only when he 

 reaches the social stage, when he becomes aggregated 

 into clans, tribes, and nations, that this problem 

 opens. For the present we must content ourselves 

 with having witnessed his arrival in the Human 

 Family the starting-point and threshold of the true 

 moral life. 



For a long tim, it is true, the Family circle, as a 

 circle, was incomplete. Machinery must itself evolve 

 before its products evolve. Scarcely defined at all, 

 broken as soon as formed, the earlier circles allowed 

 their strongest forces to escape almost at the moment 

 they generated. But the walls grew higher and 

 higher with the advance of history. The leakage 

 became less and less. With the Christian era the 

 machinery was complete ; the circle finally closed in, 

 and became a secluded shrine where the culture of 

 everything holy and beautiful was carried on. The 

 path by which this ideal con summation was reached 

 was not, as we have seen, a straight patli ; nor has the 

 integrity of the institution been always preserved 

 through the later centuries. The difficulty of realiz- 

 ing the ideal may be judged of by the fewness of the 

 nations now living who have reached it, and by the 

 multitude of peoples and tribes who have vanished 

 from the earth without attaining. From the failure 



