Page:Little Essays of Love and Virtue (1922).djvu/82

 marked. One may know a man well in the world as a man and not know him at all in his home as a husband; not necessarily that he is unfavourably revealed in the latter capacity. It is simply that he is different.

The explanation is not really far to seek. A man in the world is in vital response to the influences around him. But a husband in the home is playing a part which was created for him long centuries before he was born. He is falling into a convention, which, indeed, was moulded to fit many masculine human needs but has become rigidly traditionalised. Thus the part no longer corresponds accurately to the player’s nature nor to the circumstances under which it has to be played.

In the marriage system which has prevailed in our world for several thousand years, a certain hierarchy, or sacred order in authority, has throughout been recognised. The family has been regarded as a small State of which the husband and father is head. Classic paganism and Christianity differed on many points, but they were completely at one on this. The Roman system was on a patriarchal basis and continued to be so theoretically even when in practise it came to allow great independence to the wife. Christianity, although it allowed complete spiritual freedom to the individual, introduced no fundamentally new theory of the family, and, indeed,