Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/43

from God, and can alone exist through him, either in name or in reality. Had God permitted an entire oblivion of all paradisiacal traditions, mankind would have lost even the name of this institution.

The family relation is divine in its institution and in its nature, and has everywhere shared the vicissitudes of Catholic civilization; and it is very certain that the purity or the corruption of the first is invariably an infallible symptom of a corresponding condition of the second; as the history of the various vicissitudes and changes of the latter becomes equally the history of similar alternations in the former.

In Catholic ages, the family relation tends to the highest degree of excellence; its human element is spiritualized, and the cloister takes the place of the domestic circle. While in the domestic life children reverently submit to their father and mother, the inmates of cloisters, with a still greater reverence and submission, bathe with their tears the sacred feet of a better Father, and the holy habit of a more tender mother. When Catholic civilization is no longer in the ascendant and begins. to decline, the family relation immediately becomes impaired, its constitution vitiated, its elements disunited, and all its ties enfeebled. The father and mother whom God had united in the bonds of affection, substitute for this sacred tie a severe formality; while the children lose that filial reverence enjoined upon them by God, and a sacrilegious familiarity usurps its place. The ties which unite the family are loosened, debased, and profaned. Finally, they become obliterated, the family disperses, and is lost in the circles of the clubs and places of amusement.

The history of the family may be traced in a few