were. We no longer have large families: all the families are too
small to give the children the necessary social training. The
Roman father is out of fashion; and the whip and the cane are
becoming discredited, not so much by the old arguments against
corporal punishment (sound as these were) as by the gradual
wearing away of the veil from the fact that flogging is a form of
debauchery. The advocate of flogging as a punishment is now
exposed to very disagreeable suspicions; and ever since Rousseau
rose to the effort of making a certain very ridiculous confession
on the subject, there has been a growing perception that child
whipping, even for the children themselves, is not always the
innocent and high-minded practice it professes to be. At all
events there is no getting away from the facts that families are
smaller than they used to be, and that passions which formerly
took effect in tyranny have been largely diverted into
sentimentality. And though a little sentimentality may be a very
good thing, chronic sentimentality is a horror, more dangerous,
because more possible, than the erotomania which we all condemn
when we are not thoughtlessly glorifying it as the ideal married
state.


THE GOSPEL OF LAODICEA

Let us try to get at the root error of these false domestic
doctrines. Why was it that the late Samuel Butler, with a
conviction that increased with his experience of life, preached
the gospel of Laodicea, urging people to be temperate in what they
called goodness as in everything else? Why is it that I, when I
hear some well-meaning person exhort young people to make it a