This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ...city administration making good homes impossible, sex perversions and exploitations substituting sacrilege for the sanctity of marriage and parentage--these are as essentially the problems of religion and the Church as of the economic and political sciences, as of legislation and statesmanship. For generation ...
Read More
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ...city administration making good homes impossible, sex perversions and exploitations substituting sacrilege for the sanctity of marriage and parentage--these are as essentially the problems of religion and the Church as of the economic and political sciences, as of legislation and statesmanship. For generation conditions regeneration. The first birth very certainly limits the promise and the effect of the " second birth." Eeligion can serve its own ends no more surely or highly than to assure every child a better chance to be born aright the first time so that it may be reborn more surely and to higher purpose. It was a clergyman of the Church of England, the Rev. Thomas Kobert Malthus, who, in 1798, made the first thorough attempt to relate the birth-rate to the food supply. His purpose was to prove that " among the causes which impede the progress of mankind toward happiness, the chief is the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it." Although his statistics by which he sought to establish mathematically the ratio between the increase of the birth-rate and that of the food supply were abandoned by the author himself as untrustworthy, and although some of his arguments have been superseded by the criticisms of other economists, this fundamental " Malthusian " relation between birth and food is so vital that it persists, not only in the discussions of the economists, but among the most serious practical problems involving marriage and family life. The initiative thus given to scientific inquiry into the propagation of the race is now proceeding from a negative to a positive basis and aim. Daunted by what seemed at first to be a fixed limit to the sustenance of life, Malthus over-emphasised the...
Read Less
