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Religion and the Family

The purpose of marriage is two-fold.

First, it provides the joy that accompanies conjugal and family love. We are so endowed, and it has been so ordained, that full happiness can be won only through the associations made possible by family life.

A family consists of parents and children. There is no real family life without children. Mother-love, father-love, parental-love, must be satisfied to obtain full family joy. Marriage is incomplete unless children are begotten, reared, and trained.

The second purpose of marriage is to provide bodies for the pre-existent spirit children of God, who have earned the right to come on earth. These spirits have accepted the plan of salvation, and are anxiously waiting for the opportunity to take upon themselves temporal bodies, and to share in the experiences of life on earth. They accept gladly the call to come here, for they know that the experiences of earth are a preparation for the glorious, eternal activities in that other world which we enter after death.

In the light of this knowledge, the begetting and training of children acquire a high spiritual meaning. When a child is born, another pre-existent personage is given the privilege of preparation on earth for his divine destiny; another step is taken to complete the plan laid out in the Great Council of pre-existence.

Under these two purposes, marriage becomes a sacred privilege; really a partnership with the Lord in achieving the purpose of the plan of salvation.

Under this doctrine, children are joyously welcomed by Latter-day Saints. The responsibilities accompanying the having of children are not only willingly but gladly accepted.

Under this doctrine, also, Latter-day Saints are not parties to the agitation to limit the number of children in a family. This unwholesome practice is in defiance of the experience that, all in all, large families are the happiest. There is in large families a varied interplay of thought and behavior that maintains interest in life and living, and compels personal self-control. No member of a large family, properly conducted, has wished that it might have been smaller. As the years move on, there is increasing appreciation of the many contacts made possible by a large family.

Childless couples confess to their longing for children, to enlarge their happiness; and are often led to adopt children. Childless couples are most subject to marital differences. One student reports that about "70 per cent of all childless couples dissolve their marriages in divorce." 1 For marital happiness, children are a good insurance. They are "the tie that binds husband and wife together."

They who airily say that they look for quality rather than quantity in children talk nonsense. The inborn quality of our children is beyond parental control. We cannot transmit to them more than we ourselves have or our ancestors had. If we are superior, or our progenitors were so, we may have superior children. The number of children bears no relationship to their quality. Very often the last child of a large family has been the most largely endowed by nature.