ge has the family over the school and larger groups
for educational purposes?

4. In what sense is the family an ideal democracy?

5. Show how the family sets spiritual values first.

6. What in your judgment are the first evidences of character
development? In what way do these come to the surface in the
family? What is the factor of love in the development of character?

7. Is that an ideal family in which none of the members bear pain
or are called upon for self-denial? Can you see any especial
advantage to character in the very difficulties and apparent
disadvantages in the life of the family?

FOOTNOTES:

[5] See "Democracy in the Home," _American Journal of Sociology_,
January, 1912.

[6] Francis G. Peabody, _The Approach to the Social Question_, p. 94.

CHAPTER IV

THE RELIGIOUS PLACE OF THE FAMILY

Sec. 1. DEVELOPMENT AS A RELIGIOUS INSTITUTION

The family is the most important religious institution in the life of
today. It ranks in influence before the church. It has always held this
place. Even among primitive peoples, where family life was an uncertain
quantity, the relations of parents, or of one of the parents, to the
children afforded the opportunity most frequently used for their
instruction in tribal religious ideals and customs. We cannot generalize
as to the practices of savage man in regard to family life, for those
practices range from common promiscuous relationships, without apparent
care for offspring, to a family unity and purity approaching the best we
know; but this much is certain, that there was a common sense of
responsibility for the training of young children in moral and religious
ideas and customs, and that, in the degree that the family approached to
separateness and unity, it accepted the primary responsibility for this
task. The higher the type of family life the more fully does it
discharge its function in the education of the child.[7]

It might be safe to say that among primitive peoples there were three
stages, or types, of relationship based on the breeding of children, or
three stages of development toward family life. The first is a loose and
indefinite relationship existing principally between the adults, or the
males and females, under which children born when not desired are
neglected or strangled and, when acceptable, may be in the care of
either parent, or of neither. Since the group, associated throug