"The splendid vision of wedded love, granted by God to the heart of youth, seems but divine mockery when met by town conditions, which make the begetting of a family seem a crime against the State.
It is to the credit of our sober days that amongst the most sober fugitives from that proximate occasion of sin called “the modern town” are to be found young men and women whose heart is stirring with the self-sacrificial desires of wedlock and parenthood.
It is in these aspirants to wedded vows that poor prodigal, man, turns from the squalor of a stye and the company of swine to a home furnished and adorned with husband and wife, parent and child.
In that holy place of human love, room and need will be found for the parent, now become the grandfather or grandmother. How ill-organised is a world that has no other place than an “Institution,” a Workhouse, for the wisdom of the old. But what a school of human and divine love, and therefore of wisdom that springs from love, is a Home made possible and safe by the Homestead. Modern seekers after the true method of education will seek in vain until they recognise the wisdom in the phrase once uttered by a woman of the crowd: “I had nothing but home-schooling.” Yet the home-schooling now almost absent from town life is so fundamental that, in another phrase of a Priest of God: “Political Economy is the child of Domestic Economy.” This only says, in language of the Schools, that God has made the Family to be the unit and model of the State, and that the greatest praise of Sovereign Power is to call the wielder of that power the “Father of his People.”
- Fr Vincent McNabb
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