Ideas become fruitful and productive of good only when they are embodied in institutions, and the root principles that God is our father and all men brothers, that chastity and gentleness, reverence and obedience, patience and love, have priceless value; that woman and the child are infinitely sacred, could not have created a public opinion favorable to their acceptance and diffusion had they not been taken up into the life of the Church; had they not been proclaimed and enforced by her and made part of her organic structure. It was not mechanical and scientific progress, not the increase of wealth and knowledge, but her influence, her ministry, her orders, her whole social fabric, that preserved the monogamic family and lifted woman to a grace and power in the world she had hitherto never known. In the face of whatever wrongs and degradations, even though found in the sanctuary itself, she proclaimed the doctrines of righteousness, asserted the majesty and supremacy of the law. Abuses never discouraged her; wrongs never diminished the ardor with which she defended the home against the passions that threatened its ruin, and in this warfare that which first of all was at stake was woman's honor and welfare.
But while she consecrates and guards the temple of domestic love, the Church maintains that a state of perfect chastity, of virginity, has, from an ideal point of view at least, yet higher and holier worth. In marriage the man and the woman are little more than the instruments whereby the race is multiplied and preserved. But human beings are primarily and essentially ends, not means, and the most precious results of a people's life, of the life of the race itself, are noble and godlike personalities. The right estimate is not by number and quantity, but by kind and quality. The continuance of the race is indispensable, but it is not less indispensable that individuals should move upward in the light of true ideals. Hence Our Lord seems to lay the chief stress of His teaching and example on the perfection of the individual soul. Failure here is utter failure, though one should gain the whole world. Hence, too, the Church concerns herself first of all with the overcoming of sin, with the creating of holiness, with the salvation of souls. She appeals to those who hear the divine whisperings in the innermost
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