Man has attained this result through the training of children by parents in the family, of youth by masters in schools, and of adults each by himself in the world at large.
Perhaps the most precious result of the institution of marriage is the education furnished by the family which results from marriage. In Greek life this education was the kernel of Greek religion. Every family worshipped its own gods, and these gods were the shades of its ancestors. Almost every duty in life resolved itself into a duty to these shades; the duty to marry was but to ensure offspring who would continue to minister to the deceased; the duty of chastity, and indeed of morality in general, resolved itself into a duty to keep inviolable the sacred flame upon the hearth.
The two virtues peculiarly stimulated by Greek religion were courage in man and chastity in woman; these singularly correspond to the qualities that characterize solitary carnivora—ferocity in the male and compulsory fidelity in the female. They are the virtues that attend individualism, and individualism so impregnated Greek civilization that it prevented the Greek cities from ever combining into a Greek nation, and ultimately left them a prey to the invader. And those two individualistic virtues—courage and chastity—became still more emphasized under the Roman rule in the soldier and the vestal.
Christianity introduced a new element into civilized life; Christ deprecated exhibitions of courage by inculcating humility; He tempered the fierce demand for fidelity by bidding "him who was without sin cast the first stone at her." The virtue He taught above all was the virtue of Love; not love in the sense of natural affection, but love in the sense of sacrifice; not love confined to the family, but love extended from the family to the neighbor: "Love your neighbor as yourself." And so under the dispensation of Christ all men, being the children of a common Father, became as brothers one to another; the early Christians carrying out this theory into practical life, abandoned the acquisition of private wealth and brought all their earnings into a common stock, giving to everyone according to his need.
Unfortunately, the prosperity of the Church under Constantine converted it into a political machine as unconscionable in its methods, and as effectual in results, as the so-called rings which govern many cities to-day. The Church forgot the virtues which it was instituted to teach; and our Western civilization has ever since been distracting us by encouraging the fighting virtues of the Roman soldier on the one hand, and the altogether inconsistent humility of the Christian saint on the other.
But men and women cannot live close to one another for centuries, without having social virtues forced upon them; and while the competitive system which prevails in our industrial and international relations has stimulated the fighting qualities in us, the teaching of Christ has preserved in our hearts ideas of happiness which have more or less unconsciously created a tendency to replace competition by coöperation wherever possible.
The joint effect of Roman and Christian rules of conduct has been to substitute for the qualities that we observe in Nature—the lust and ferocity of the carnivore and the servility of the ant—new qualities altogether different, and in some respects almost opposite. For lust has been replaced by a conception of the conjugal relation which converts marriage into a sacrament; ferocity has yielded to the courage of the medieval knight and the modern gentleman; servility tends to disappear and be replaced by respect for laws; and fear has been lifted by religion into reverence—"The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom."
The fact that these virtues are held up to us as desirable and that we are trained to conform thereto, is of dominating importance in considering the character of human environment; and were there nothing in human institutions to render the universal practice of these virtues impossible, we should assuredly enjoy the happiness that must result therefrom.
Unfortunately there are two reasons why we cannot practice these virtues though we would:
We are divided into nations, each striving against all the rest to secure for its citizens the largest possible share of the good things of this world. Every nation is composed of individuals or families, each engaged in a similar strife.