Those forms of free love or facile divorce to which radical opinion and practice incline in these days tend to transform the family without abolishing it. Many unions might continue to be lasting, and the children in any case would remain with one or the other parent. The family has already suffered greater transformations than that suggested by this sect. Polygamy persists, involving its own type of morals and sentiment, and savage tribes show even more startling conventions. Nor is it reasonable to dismiss all ideals but the Christian and then invoke Christian patience to help us endure the consequent evils, which are thus declared to be normal. No evil is normal. Of course virtue is the cure for every abuse; but the question is the true complexion of virtue and the regimen needful to produce it. Christianity, with its non-political and remedial prescriptions, in the form of prayer, penance, and patience, has left the causes of every evil untouched. It has so truly come to call the sinner to repentance that its occupation would be gone if once the sin could be abolished. [Sidenote: Individualism in a sense rational.] While a desirable form of society entirely without the family is hard to conceive, yet the general tendency in historic times, and the marked tendency in periods of ripe development, has been toward individualism. Individualism is in one sense the only possible ideal; for whatever social order may be most valuable can be valuable only for its effect on conscious individuals. Man is of course a social animal and needs society first that he may come safely into being, and then that he may have something interesting to do. But society itself is no animal and has neither instincts, interests, nor ideals. To talk of such things is either to speak metaphorically or to think mythically; and myths, the more currency they acquire, pass the more easily into superstitions. It would be a gross and pedantic superstition to venerate any form of society in itself, apart from the safety, breadth, or sweetness which it lent to individual happiness. If the individual may be justly subordinated to the state, not merely for the sake of a future freer generation, but permanently and in the ideal society, the reason is simply that such subordination is a part of man’s natural devotion to things rational and impersonal, in the presence of which alone he can be personally happy. Society, in its future and its past, is a natural object of interest like art or science; it exists, like them, because only when lost in such rational objects can a free soul be active and immortal. But all these ideals are terms in some actual life, not alien ends, important to nobody, to which, notwithstanding, everybody is to be sacrificed.