check it by all proper legal and personal endeavor, including greater care on the part of ministers respecting the history, character, and standing of those whom they join in marriage. As parents and teachers we need wisely to instruct our youth respecting the meaning and sacredness and joy of marriage, to train them to personal purity, and to point out to them the frightful consequences of vicious indulgence. As citizens to give our support to the authorities in the detection and punishment of crimes against chastity, to protect our homes and schools from the assaults of vice, and to unearth and crush those who, as a trade, or in connection with business houses, or in society, directly pander to licentiousness.

2. The second thing imperatively needed is that we should distinctly make more of the family and the home. That we should seek to develop them in their social functions and to secure them their appropriate place in respect to other social forces and institutions. The tendency of our times is to neglect the natural, which is the divine ordinance, and to put stress upon the temporary, artificial, and mechanical contrivance; to disregard vital energies and worship system; to forget life, working divinely, in divine forms, and to set up a machine. We see this in art, in education, in religion. This tendency has caused, and is causing, neglect of the family and all those profound and subtle forces which lie back of, and when properly directed, constitute the family.

Sex and sexual relation are fundamental facts and energies of human society, profoundly influencing all other facts and energies. They are sure to make their impression in some fashion upon all social institutions. We believe that the family is their divinely ordained outcome and content, by the conservation of which man is to be developed to his highest stature as a child of God. Therefore the family needs not only defence, but culture into the completeness of the true law of nature, which is the law of God.

The truest thinker, economist, reformer, philanthropist, is the man who seeks to clear away the rubbish that hinders the working of life and of living energies, to magnify them, to set them free from error and misdirection and give them their proper position in human affairs. Again it is so in art, in education, in religion. Study must thus rally to the support of nature. So having tended by contrivance to neglect the family, we must now contrive to restore it.

To secure this exaltation of the family to its normal position in the social order, two main things are necessary; first, scientific guidance, and second, practical work.

1. We need expert instructors in our colleges and universities, themselves husbands and fathers, to study scientifically from the standpoint of biology, history, economics, and sociology the whole problem of sex and the family in their origin, development, changes, functions, and relation to social progress; to clear away errors and delusions; to furnish us facts instead of outworn theories and sentiments; to give scientific direction to work, and to teach our young men and women to become themselves intelligent centres of the clearest thought, loftiest convictions, and best practice on this great subject. Already this good work is started in some institutions, but it greatly needs enlargement and encourage

ment.

2. Our theological seminaries should take up the same task, not indeed, to make original investigations, or to cumber their courses with too elaborate study, but to bring the best results of scientific work to bear in the immediate equipment of young ministers for their practical labors in pulpit, parish, and community, for the conservation of the family.

The old time notions of what is needed in the preparation of ministers have greatly changed and improved in recent years, but more still needs to be done to qualify our young ministers to deal effectively with such problems as the country town, the city poor, the ignorance and moral destitution of both. Among all these problems none is more important than that of the family, and the forces that imperil and may strengthen it; for the family, in some form, is everywhere, and all that touches it for good or ill deeply touches society.

3. The pulpit and religious press should give far wider space to direct guidance and instruction upon all the great themes that connect themselves with the family and the home. Here is a great opportunity seriously neglected. Our congregations and communities will welcome discourses that shall deal candidly, and in the light of present facts and tendencies, with these subjects. Here there should be plain, honest, and at the same time sympathetic and helpful speech. Let ministers upon a scientific basis, as well as with scriptural authority, try to point out some of the serious dangers that beset the whole sexual relation, the family and home,

and dwell on the sweet sentiments and experiences which they reveal, on the joys and duties that belong to married life, on the blessings that spring from parenthood, on the formative power of home life upon children, upon the divine promises to a well ordered home, and upon the importance of the family to the church the state and society. Let them endeavor by wise counsel, to dissipate the mass of ignorance and foolish sentiment that now too often clouds the mind and spoils the conduct on this great matter, In a word the pulpit must begin to make family life the central thing, and to put it where God has put it. One Sunday in the year, say the one preceding or following Thanksgiving, might well be set apart by our churches as Family Sunday. Or perhaps Children's Sunday might have a larger use to this end.

4. The church in all its life and organization must make a great advance in its recognition and strengthening of the family and family life as absolutely fundamental to its own security. The pastor must lay himself out to sympathize with and guide his young people in that most critical of all stages of development that which precedes and concerns itself with marriage. Two or three hours spent in friendly guidance of one young person at such a crisis is worth a hundred perfunctory parish calls. To help by kindly advice wisely to start and purely maintain one sound christian home; or to protect and strengthen one that is in danger or weak; or to exalt to the highest point of power and beauty one that is commonplace and wearisome, is a task worthy the best gifts of the ablest pastor.

Then the weekly prayer meeting should be directed from the inane platitudes that now often oppress it, to vital subjects connected with family life, the duties of parents, the nurture of children and youth, the uses and defence of the home, the dangers that threaten it, and the means to avoid and overcome them.

Further, Bible and especially Sunday school instruction should be emancipated from the over elaborate and mechanical study of comparative trifles that now too frequently embarrass it to the point of weariness, and under competent guidance should be directed to furnish children and youth with knowledge and discipline upon the solemn realities, joys, duties, and perils that are connected with the family. It sometimes seems as though our systems of Sunday school instruction were specially devised to get as far away as possible from the real needs and actualities of life.

We need to bring this instruction back to conduct, and of all conduct that which in some way is connected with the family is a chief part. In this effort the Bible sets us the best example and is the best text book. Let us use it vitally, to meet vital needs, and our Sunday schools will be rescued from much that now makes them a bore to young people.

Still further special work ought, by the church, to be assigned to and expected of the home, as distinct from the individual and the Sunday school and other public assemblies. In fact, as the individual has been disastrously overworked in our theology and polity to the neglect of the home, it is time now for a change. Here is the most primitive, most universal, and perhaps the most powerful of social institutions only needing, by the development of its own capacities, to be recovered to its normal position and opportunities and it will become the chief agency in a new Christianity. Young people entering upon marriage, fathers, mothers, and children should be sympathetically taught that the family has a divine unity and special functions of its own, and should be stimulated to honor the home by the assignment to it of such tasks as courses of reading, fire-side travels, art interests, Bible study, neighborhood, mission, and relief work, etc., tasks by the performance of which through the home, a wise pastor could rouse a sense of responsibility for it, and secure definite results. In this connection the newly started Home Department of the Sunday school deserves unqualified praise. It has here a wide field and can be most successfully developed. Every pastor and Sunday school worker should study its methods and try to set it at work. It has science, common sense, and Scripture for its basis; and moreover it is one of those agencies, of which we have all too few, by which a healthy opposition to the frightful tendency to social congestion can be set up, and by which the vital current can be set in motion towards the extremities of the social body as well as towards the heart. Especially in country towns and remote districts a little tact and energy on the part of a pastor or layman, can, on these principles of domestic study, set hundreds of now practically godless homes upon the beneficent work of moral and religious self improvement, and thereby not only rouse them to new mental and spiritual life, but give them a fresh consciousness of their own duties and worthiness, and fit them for helpers of the church.

Attention has lately been strongly turned both upon the social

and civil importance of the country town in relation to the whole population, and also upon its appalling moral and religious destitution, particularly in New England. One of our first duties in view of these facts is to exert ourselves to rehabilitate and dignify the country home by making it the intelligent and responsible centre of a new life. We shall best mend much that is bad in the condition of the country church by lifting up that which lies back of it, the country home. Here our publishing and tract societies can help us very much by giving us the best and cheapest literature for the home, a literature based on facts, and itself strong, sound, and wholesome.

There should be an enlargement of the personal energies, especially of our stronger churches, by the employment of pastor's assistants or missionaries, to whom should be assigned particular districts and whose duties should be to develop home life, enrich and strengthen it, especially on the woman's side. Local conferences or associations might profitably take up this work. We have mechanism enough, but not a tenth part of the personal forces that we should have. We must enlist more helping hands and throbbing hearts to fill with quickening energy the divine institutions of the family and the home, that they may exert their salutary functions in the midst of the ferment of modern society.

And finally and most important of all, we should make our own homes the most attractive place in the world to ourselves and our children.

It is only proper to say here that in the opinion of the committee the National Divorce Reform League and its work are eminently worthy the formal support of the National Council.

The inadequate study which your committee have been able to give to this question has deeply impressed them with the conviction that there is scarcely any subject which, in every aspect, has more critical significance for the future of christianity than that of the family; that to arouse attention to the perils and possibilities of the family, and to awaken the family itself to a consciousness of its own needs and mission, is one of the great duties of the hour.

And your committee in concluding this report beg leave to recommend:

I. That a committee of five be appointed by this Council whose duty it shall be,