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Updated: May 1, 2025
The family as a social institution has been scarcely touched until a very recent historical period by the rationalizing process that has affected religious and political institutions. Economic changes resultant upon the introduction of an industrial era which showed the importance of women in diverse social relations were causes of this new effort at adaptation to changing conditions.
It would be such a fine thing to bring over one of those Protestant heretics, and a "liberal" one too! not that there was any real difference between them, but it sounded better to say that one of these rationalizing free-and-equal religionists had been made a convert than any of those half-way Protestants who were the slaves of catechisms instead of councils and of commentators instead of popes.
The old seclusion and avoidance of the pregnant woman still persists. The embarrassment of any public appearance when pregnancy is evident, the jokes and secrecy which surround this event, show how far we are from rationalizing this function.
"In the public schools," said the doctor, "the children are taught that blueskins are now carriers of the disease they survived three generations ago! That they hate everybody who isn't a blueskin. That they are constantly scheming to introduce their plague here so most of us will die and the rest will become blueskins. That's beyond rationalizing. It can't be true, but it's not safe to doubt it."
The endeavor to obtain a knowledge of divine and human things was in Greece slowly and with difficulty evolved from their religious notions, and it was for a long time confined to the refining and rationalizing of their mythology.
Or, if that is too technical a statement, it may be said that the church exists to set forth and foster the religious life and that, because of the nature of that life, it finds its chief opportunity for so doing in the imaginative rather than the rationalizing or practical areas of human expression.
It is the close psychological association between the emotion of religion and the emotion of sex which has always made women more religious than men. This is perhaps only to say that women are nearer the secret of the universe than men. It may well be so. Man's rationalizing tendency to divorce his intelligence from his intuition may not be the precise key which opens those magic doors!
"They have taken away my Saviour, and I know not where they have laid him;" so the simple folk have a right to say, and I repeat it with them. Thus, while some shock me by their sacerdotal dogmatism, others repel me by their rationalizing laicism.
These modern rationalizing methods have made but a slight impression on the vast complex of the fossil plants and animals, affecting the names of only a few of the larger and better known forms. In the realm of invertebrate palæontology, however, the "splitters" are still holding high carnival, in spite of the efforts of some very prominent scientists in the opposite direction.
But as no man is bound to discredit his own relic, and such is certainly not the practice of the Armenian Church, I will not disturb my readers' minds or yield to the rationalizing tendencies of the age by suggesting it.
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