It is needful in the outset, as already suggested, frankly to accept marriage and the family as social institutions whose problems must be studied in connection with the actual conditions of modern social life. It is vain to appeal to ideals born of old and very different conditions. The guiding light will come, not from authority, but from a rational understanding of the existing facts. Small progress can be expected while leaning upon tradition. The appeal to theological criteria is, no doubt, matter of conscience on the part of many earnest men. Nevertheless the vast literature which seeks to solve social questions through the juggling with ancient texts seems in reality to be largely a monument of wasted energy. Much of it is sterile, or but serves to retard progress or to befog the issue. Witness the perennial discussion of the "scriptural" grounds of divorce, or of the Levitical sanction or condemnation of marriage with a deceased wife's sister! Witness the vapid homilies and treatises on the wedded life! There is, in truth, urgent need that the moral leaders of men should preach actual instead of conventional social righteousness. It is high time that the family and its related institutions should be as freely and openly and unsparingly subjected to scientific examination as are the facts of modern political or industrial life. From the infancy of the human race, we have already seen, the monogamic family has been the _prevailing_ type. There have been, it is true, many variations, many aberrations, from this type under diverse conditions, religious, economic, or social. Under changing influences the interrelations of the members of the group--of husband and wife, of parent and child--and their relations individually and collectively to the state, have varied from age to age or from people to people. There have been wife-capture, wife-purchase and the _patria potestas_. But in essential character--at first for biological, later for ethical or spiritual reasons--the general tendency has always been toward a higher, more clearly differentiated type of the single pairing family. Moreover, setting aside all question of special priestly sanctions, the healthiest social sentiment has more and more demanded that the "pairing" should be lasting. Whether of Jew or gentile, the highest ideal of marriage has become that of a lifelong partnership. Are these tendencies to remain unbroken? Is the stream of evolution to proceed, gaining in purity and strength? Are marriage and the family doomed; or are they capable of adaptation, of reform and development, so as to satisfy the higher material and ethical requirements of the advancing generations? Seemingly they are now menaced by serious dangers. Some of them have their origin in the new conditions of a society which is undergoing a swift transition, a mighty transformation, industrially, intellectually, and spiritually; while others, perhaps the more imminent, are