Christian Institutions

Extract

In every age, even in the centuries called Christian, believers have had to lament the infidelities of men. That is a grief which concerns, most of all, our own individual souls. But the lawyer and the statesman are concerned with institutions, and with the fact that these institutions have been Christian for centuries and have ceased to be so in our time. Christian lawyers and statesmen should feel a tremendous responsibility for this decline of Christian standards in their own generation. They cannot be consoled by the sort of sophistry which suggests that Christian institutions are impossible; that to talk about them only betrays an external view and an unspiritual outlook; that there may be more genuine Christianity in the souls of a few human beings in a so-called unchristian age than in all those celebrated centuries of Christian culture, and that it is only this true Christianity in some individual souls which really matters.

There is one institution, however, which is so closely connected with the very essence of human personality that nobody should venture to call it external; namely, matrimony. And there have been two fundamental changes in it during the last four or five centuries: one that dates back to the Reformation and one that is a specific development of our own time.