the life of nature continually reproduces itself. In the human world this reproduction of life is carried on through the medium of sex. Early thought had not introduced any stark dualism between human volition and the life of nature. Hence in all early religions the sex life is treated as a sacrament because through it the individual participates in the undying life of the race. The cult of the Great Mother was prominent in the ancient Mediterranean civilizations. This Great Mother was the source of all life, the life of vegetation, the life of the animal, as well as of the human world.

The beautiful and lofty idealism of the morality of sex in the early Hebrew morality has a naturalism and directness which are impossible to us moderns. Our wills have gone through the terrible fire of mediæval asceticism. After the rise of the prophetic ideals a terrible sense of shame was associated with the pillar and the green tree of the older nature worship. But in the earlier stage there was no sense of shame associated with the idea of sex.

The instincts of sex and parenthood were organized into the structure of the family not by individual selfconscious reflection, but by minds saturated and controlled by group sentiment and tradition. The love of children, of wife, of family, is one of the deeper sources of conduct in the Old Testament (Prov. 18:22). The intervention of a reflective, dubious will between man's more instinctive, natural life and his moral conduct had not yet arisen. There was an unbroken, spontaneous coöperation of the moral will with the deeper life of nature. Nationality resting on the

solidarity of the clan-family furnished the basis of immortality. The consciousness of family was a permanent, inescapable, emotional drive underlying all behavior and all thought. There is a tendency in this direction in all agricultural forms of society and early Hebrew life was fundamentally pastoral and agricultural.

Better be without hands and feet, say the Japanese, than without a family. The funeral tablets dedicated to the dead in the Japanese home; the offerings of wine, of food, of speech, give to the departed a form of immortality which is concrete; it is experienced; it is realized in a family consciousness. It is not an immortality formally believed by a cold intellect. The Japanese and the Chinese still keep alive the family consciousness which was so fundamental in ancient Hebrew morality.

CHAPTER IV

THE FAMILY IN THE EARLY GREEK TRADITION

To give the reader the early Greek view of the family we may quote Plutarch's account of Lycurgus' legislation regarding the family, especially since it breathes the same spirit as Plato's Republic. Lycurgus, says Plutarch, "ordered the maidens to exercise themselves with wrestling, running, throwing the quoit, and casting the dart, to the end that the fruit they conceived might, in strong and healthy bodies, take firmer root and find better growth, and withal that they, with this greater vigor, might be the more able to undergo the pains of child-bearing . . . Hence it was natural for them to think and speak as Gorgo, for example, the wife of Leonidas, is said to have done, when some foreign lady, as it would seem, told her that the women of Lacedæmon were the only women in the world who could rule men: 'With good reason,' she said, 'for we are the only women who bring forth men!'" Bachelors "were denied that respect and observance which the younger men paid their elders; and no man, for example, found fault with what was said to Dercyllidas, though so eminent a commander, upon whose approach one day, a young man, instead of rising, retained his seat, remarking, 'No child of yours will make room for me.' And, indeed, Lycurgus was

of a persuasion that children were not so much the property of their parents as of the whole commonwealth; the laws of other nations seemed to him very absurd and inconsistent, when people would be so solicitous for their dogs and horses as to exert interest and pay money to procure fine breeding; as if it were not apparent that children of a bad breed would prove their bad qualities . . . and well-born children, in a like manner, their good qualities."

When we study the Homeric family we find the same naturalness and directness which we have seen to obtain in the early Greek attitude toward the body and toward nature. Homer makes Diomedes say to Paris: When my sharp shaft "layeth low its man, torn are the cheeks of his wife, and fatherless his children." The Homeric citizen cannot be dealt with as an individual, this passage implies; wound a Homeric Greek and you wound a wife and children. Over the slain Sokos Odysseus exclaims: "Ah, wretch, thy father and lady mother shall not close thine eyes in death, but birds that eat flesh raw shall tear thee, shrouding thee in the multitude of their wings." How adequately do these passages portray the organic relation of the Homeric Greek to the family! Laertes, seeing his son, Odysseus, and his grandson, Telemachus, fighting in heavy armor against their common foe, exclaims: "What a day has dawned for me, kind gods; yea, a glad man am I! My son and my son's son vying with one another in valour." What a background of ethical sentiment is disclosed in such an exclamation! Judged by modern standards the position of woman was not high. Telemachus tells his mother that his is the lord

ship of the house and that her business is to guide her handmaids in plying the loom and distaff; and Penelope accepts her position as right and wise. Nor need we be shocked that Agamemnon, to appease Achilles' wrath, offers him as a gift any one of his three daughters, for the Old Testament shows us the same custom. On the other hand Homer in describing Nausicaa's attitude toward her approaching wedding refers to the event as the time of "glad marriage.' Odysseus asks that the gods grant Nausicaa's desire, -a home and a husband and a mind at one with his, for there is nothing nobler than this. The words of Nausicaa's father to Odysseus himself: "Would that so goodly a man as thou art, wouldst wed my daughter, and be called my son," show the Homeric mind on this question. And lest our modern minds misunderstand the attitude of the Homeric woman we need only recall the words of Nausicaa herself addressed to her maids concerning Odysseus: "Would that such an one might be called my husband, dwelling here."

There is no more tender paternal sentiment in literature than that which is expressed in Homer's description of the meeting of the Trojan Hector with his wife, the "white-armed" Andromache, and the little boy Astyanax. Andromache implores Hector to remain with her upon the tower lest she be made a widow and their little son an orphan. Hector replies that he would be ashamed to face Trojans and Trojan dames, if like a coward he shrank from battle; moreover his father's glory and his own valiant soul compel him to fight. Nevertheless his love for his wife is so strong that the imagined anguish of a defeated Trojan king