he home, and the more
familiar the family, the worse for everybody concerned. The family ideal
is a humbug and a nuisance: one might as reasonably talk of the barrack
ideal, or the forecastle ideal, or any other substitution of the
machinery of social organization for the end of it, which must always
be the fullest and most capable life: in short, the most godly life. And
this significant word reminds us that though the popular conception of
heaven includes a Holy Family, it does not attach to that family
the notion of a separate home, or a private nursery or kitchen or
mother-in-law, or anything that constitutes the family as we know it.
Even blood relationship is miraculously abstracted from it; and the
Father is the father of all children, the mother the mother of all
mothers and babies, and the Son the Son of Man and the Savior of his
brothers: one whose chief utterance on the subject of the conventional
family was an invitation to all of us to leave our families and follow
him, and to leave the dead to bury the dead, and not debauch ourselves
at that gloomy festival the family funeral, with its sequel of hideous
mourning and grief which is either affected or morbid.

Family Mourning

I do not know how far this detestable custom of mourning is carried in
France; but judging from the appearance of the French people I should
say that a Frenchwoman goes into mourning for her cousins to the
seventeenth degree. The result is that when I cross the Channel I seem
to have reached a country devastated by war or pestilence. It is really
suffering only from the family. Will anyone pretend that England has
not the best of this striking difference? Yet it is such senseless and
unnatural conventions as this that make us so impatient of what we call
family feeling. Even apart from its insufferable pretensions, the family
needs hearty discrediting; for there is hardly any vulnerable part of it
that could not be amputated with advantage.

Art Teaching

By art teaching I hasten to say that I do not mean giving children
lessons in freehand drawing and perspective. I am simply calling
attention to the fact that fine art is the only teacher except torture.
I have already pointed out that nobody, except under threat of torture,
can read a school book. The reason is that a school book is not a work
of art. Similarly, you cannot listen to a lesson or a sermon unless the
teacher or the preacher is an artist. You cannot read