404 THE ASCENT OF MAN 



Human Family — the starting-point and threshold 

 of the true moral life. 



For a long time, 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 consummation was reached was not, as we 

 have seen, a straight path ; nor has the integrity 

 of the institution been always preserved through 

 the later centuries. The difficulty of realizing 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 to fulfil some one or other of the re- 

 quired conditions people after people and nation 

 after nation have come together only to disperse, 

 and leave no legacy behind except the lesson — as 

 yet in few cases understood — of why they failed. 



