The Family

THE family, a workshop of life for earth, a workshop for eternity!

__A Workshop of Life: __

What power to have control over the creation of life! God, who could have created human beings all by Himself wished to give His creatures the gift of a power which belonged only to Him. Consequently, souls will not come into the light unless parents consent to it. They will not create souls, to be sure, but by generating bodies they furnish God the means of increasing the number of souls.

Have I meditated often enough upon this magnificent power which has been conferred on me? A power which I share equally with her who is the companion of my existence? Have I meditated on the glory of fatherhood? The glory of motherhood? Have I considered what a grave sin it is to place the act which generates life and then to prevent through perverted will the coming of life to a potential human being? Or to snuff out the life which is developing in the womb of the mother?

The author of the novel, *“Jeanne,” *though not a Christian, clearly pleads the cause of Christian morals in the play he produced from his novel. The following scene briefly provides the theme of the whole play.

MADELEINE. Jeanne is always present . . . Do you know the dream I often have? I see a little hand which is trying to open a door. We are very comfortable you and I and we both push against the door with all our strength so that Jeanne cannot come in to take away a little of our ease, our luxury, our warmth . . . Then the little hand falls down and we begin to count gold pieces so as not to hear anything . . . A little whimper. . .

ANDRE. That’s a nightmare!

MADELEINE. For you yes. Remorse is a policeman . . .

ANDRE. Don’t you love me anymore, Madeleine?

MADELEINE. Since we were accomplices. . .I loved you to folly, but this love was snatched away with my child. When I came back from that abortionist, you noticed no change in my attitude. But Andre it was another woman you clasped in your arms . . . a sort of dead . . .

ANDRE. Then, always, forever, that will be between us?

MADELEINE. Not between us, with us!

Have I ever thought of the tragic intimate dramas that conjugal cheating gives rise to in the lives of parents? Have I thought of the harm done to society in times of peace? To the country I love, weakening its defenses, threatening its safety in times of war? To the Church who would have had some saints among those children who were denied birth, in any case, some priests and religious . . . Have I thought of all that?

__A Workshop for Eternity: __

The family not only contributes an increase to earthly existence but it also increases more divine life on earth, and that in two ways—from the moment of its establishment and later: The day the man and woman receive the sacrament of Matrimony, they produce, if we may so dare to speak, more divine life; each of the two become richer in the life of the Trinity within themselves; the Eternal is intermingled to a greater degree in the existence of both. Then come the children. Each will possess within itself the germ of eternity, something of the life which will never end. Death will come to end life here below, but this life is destined to bloom again: “I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting” we recite in the Creed.

To be sure, the children have free will, they can fail to attain their destiny. The devil and evil concupiscence must always be conquered. But if their origin is Christian, if the parents have done all they possibly could to do their duty and rear their offspring as they ought, it would be failing in Hope to think of the family’s being eternally cut off from some of its members.

I shall pray fervently that we may all be reunited in heaven, that we eternally sing the Sanctus as a chorus with not one of us missing.