Our law of domestic relations centres upon the home.  When the Legislature or the law-courts have interfered in the conduct of a home it has only been because one member of the family has failed to discharge the duties which an individual is required to perform towards other members of the family or towards society.  Speaking generally, the rights and duties of individual members of the family have been preserved and enforced in our statute law.  Illustrations are to be found in the Infants Act, the Destitute Persons Act, the Child Welfare Act, the Family Protection Act, and the Joint Family Homes Act.

The policy of English law is, and always has been, to keep the family together and to uphold the rights of parents.  Those rights have correlative duties attaching to them.  It is the failure of some parents to perform those duties which has now become a matter of grave concern.

The irony of the situation is that this slipping of parental responsibility has occurred contemporaneously with the granting of financial and other help to parents.  Family allowances and State homes should be concomitants of an increased sense of responsibility.  Despite all that the State has done, and is doing, for families, the moral standards of the community have somehow been undermined.  Is this because of a general lowering of the moral standards of adults?  Is the attitude of children towards sexual matters a direct reflection of the thoughts and conduct of their elders?  To borrow the words of a Jewish proverb “the apple never falls far from the tree”.  It has been firmly urged upon the Committee that there has been a “breakdown of the moral order and moral standards”.  That may be putting the matter too strongly, but there can be no denying the fact that the sanctions of morality today are not as strong as they were, say, forty or fifty years ago.

=(3) The Sanctions of Religion and Morality in Family Life=

Up till early in this century the chief sanctions operating in society were those dictated either by religion or by wisdom and past experience, i.e., religious sanctions and moral sanctions.  The standard of religious morality is that which is prescribed in the Bible, interpreted perhaps in different ways by different denominations at different times.  The standard of conventional morality is that which has been handed down from generation to generation.  There have at times been differences between the religious standard and the conventional standard.  For instance, the Church has always reprobated adultery, but even as late as the nineteenth century society accepted, without very much concern, the conduct of a man who had both a legal wife and a mistress.  Despite those occasional differences between the religious standard and the conventional standard, our system of morals has been based on the standards of Christianity.

=(4) The Moral Drift=

During last century it was strongly urged by some scientists that a religion based on faith was untenable.  Man, it was contended, should accept only what could be proved by reasoning from observed facts.  Once again there emerged, particularly in scientific and literary circles, the belief that there could be a code of morals entirely devoid of religious content.