The family is the inner citadel of religious authority and there the churches have taken their most determined stand. Long after they had abandoned politics to Caesar and business to Mammon, they continued to insist upon their authority to fix the ideal of sexual relations. But here, too, the dissolution of their authority has proceeded [p089] inexorably. They have lost their exclusive right to preside over marriages. They have not been able to maintain the dogma that marriage is indissoluble. They are not able to prevent the remarriage of divorced persons. Although in many jurisdictions fornication and adultery are still crimes, there is no longer any serious attempt to enforce the statutes. The churches have failed in their insistence that sexual intercourse by married persons is a sin unless it is validated by the willingness to beget a child. Except to the poorest and most ignorant the means of preventing conception are available to all. There is no longer any compulsion to regard the sexual life as within the jurisdiction of the commissioners of the Lord. Religious teachers knew long ago what modern psychologists have somewhat excitedly rediscovered: that there is a very intimate connection between the sexual life and the religious life. Only men living in a time when religion has lost so much of its inward vitality could be shocked at this simple truth, for the churches, when their inspiration was fresh, have always known it. That is why they have laid such tremendous emphasis upon the religious control of sexual experience, have extolled chastity, have preached continence after marriage except where parenthood was in view, have inveighed against fornication, adultery, divorce, and all unprocreative indulgence, have insisted that marriages be celebrated within the communion, have upheld the parental authority over children. They were not prudish. That is a state of mind which marks the decay of vigorous determination to control the sexual life. The early teachers did not avert their eyes. They did not mince their words. For they knew what they were doing. [p090]