Christianity and Social Life, Lectures

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Christianity And The Family. By JOHN F. EWING, M.A., West Fkee Church, Glasgow. We are so accustomed to breathe the air of a pure domestic life that we come to think of it as a matter of course, as a mere product of natural forces. Home, with the fatherhood and the motherhood, the sisterhood and the brotherhood, the wifehood and the childhood, which make it up, which sanctify it, we know to be very precious; we know what we owe to it. But the origin of this best heritage into which any man can come, we have not perhaps asked. There is a tendency, however, at present to look into origins. And it is a good tendency. We have learned only within a generation or so to examine history critically. To prove the truth and supernatural claims of Christianity we ask, What can history show that it?Christianity?-has done for man ? What results does history, critically looked at, ascribe to it as a moral force t Now there are results which Christianity claims to have -wrought which bulk large on the page of history. But it is not with one of these that we are dealing. Nor do I think that for the purpose of Christian apology these are so valuable. It is not so much by its larger results as by its finer, more exquisite products that a moral force is to be estimated. That it should have abolished slavery seems a very astonishing result of Christianity to those who know what ancient slavery was. But that it should have changed the whole aspect of family life and indefinitely elevated all its relations is a more astonishing result, and even more characteristic. We occasionally come across aspects of family existence which let us see that the Home Life, as we know it, is not just such a matter of course as we are apt indolently to conclude. It may be the artificiality or grossnes...