The Freezing of Men's Hearts
How the fire of the family went out
Charles Stanton Devas’s Studies of Family Life: A Contribution to Social Science (1886) explores the role of the family as the foundation of society. He argues that the family is critical for the healthy development of individuals and the stability of society. Now nearly 140 years old, the book has stood the test of time for its elegant explanation of a centuries-long attack on the family aimed at weakening men’s role in the home to produce the cold men ‘without affection’ that St Paul warned would characterise the ‘dangerous times’ of the last days (2 Timothy 3:3).
Industrialisation and Emasculation
Devas shows how, in the pre-industrial era, families were primarily agrarian and self-sufficient. Everyone worked together at home or on the land, resulting in a strong sense of communal family life. By focusing on factory work and urbanisation, however, industrialisation separated family members both physically and socially.
Men left the household to work in factories far away from their homes and for long hours. This decreased their involvement in domestic life and child-rearing. The family unit fragmented, and the roles of the husband and wife became more specialised and isolated from one another.
Fathers were less able to spend quality time with their children, weakening the family’s ability to function as a unit and thereby undermining its moral and emotional cohesion.
Overburdened Women
Because the factory system often paid low wages, fathers found it difficult to provide for their families. Being forced to work increasing longer hours to make ends meet meant that their wives were practically left to manage the household and raise the children alone. She ended up having to do many of the jobs the husband would traditionally have done, undermining her role as the heart of the home.
In particular, the family’s ability to instil moral values in children was weakened. The father was reduced to material providing only.
The father was no longer focused on transmitting traditional values to his children, harming the family and, ultimately, the moral foundation of society.
Urbanisation and Social Isolation
The extended family model—where multiple generations lived together or nearby—also began to break down. Families not only became smaller but also offered less support to each other.
In rural areas, families often had strong ties to their local community. They could rely on extended family for support.
In cities, however, families were often isolated, both socially and physically. This weakened the role of the family in society and made it harder for families to support each other in facing the challenges posed by industrial life.
Liberalism and Individualism
Instead of family solidarity, the goal became individual economic success. This shift eroded traditional family roles and values. The individual rather than the family became the fundamental economic and social unit.
Devas argues that individualism encouraged selfishness, weakening the strong, cooperative bonds that had traditionally held families together.
He saw this as a moral degradation that threatened the social fabric of society.
The Death of Childhood
Devas also points out how the rise of factory work led to the exploitation of child labour, with many children working long hours in unsafe conditions.
This deprived children not only of their right to a childhood free from labour but also their right to education.
And without that education, they weren’t able to develop the proper moral character needed for the future of their own families and society at large.
Masculinity and Authority
Devas shows how, traditionally, the male head of the household held the dominant authority within the family. This male authority was tied not only to the idea of the man’s role as the breadwinner but also as the moral guide for the family.
For Devas, this natural structure of family life is divinely ordained. Male authority is part of an inherent order in reality.
A father’s authority is not simply about domination or control but rooted in his responsibility to educate and guide his family. Fathers must exercise their authority in a moral and constructive way to ensure the ethical development of the family members.
Procreation before pleasure
Devas stresses that sex isn’t about selfish pleasure. It’s ultimately about building families. Sexual pleasure is good, but its purpose is ultimately to encourage procreation.
The husband and wife have a moral and social duty to have a healthy sex life.
A healthy, stable marriage creates a strong foundation for the family and therefore the moral upbringing of children.
Devas’s Warning
After surveying the family throughout history, Devas gives a striking warning:
‘if Christianity is abandoned by any large body of men, they cannot, as far as our experience goes, revert to the highest forms of family life seen among Fore-Christians, much less evolve a happier, healthier family life of their own, but revert to the lower forms among Fore-Christian families… We see in one place the honour due to parents exaggerated into idolatry, their power exaggerated into the right to take the life of their children in infancy, or to prohibit, as they grow older, their marriage or religious profession.’
Devas’s chapter on ancient China is especially insightful on excessive patriarchy as tyranny. Many masculinity influencers, in reaction to feminism, fall into precisely this error, forgetting that male authority within the family exists not for its own sake but to help wives and children flourish.
But a deficiency of patriarchy is also damaging:
‘We see in another place a miserable deficiency in parental power, a disobedient youth, precocious independence, a desolate and dishonoured old age. Again, instead of reasonable union and mutual support and affection among kindred, we see, now a superstitious attachment that puts kindred first and God second; now a melancholy deficiency of the fraternal bond, that allows each family to be quickly dissolved and brethren to be to each other as strangers.’
Honouring anything requires keeping it in its proper place in the hierarchy of reality, and in marriage in particular men must be careful to avoid making too much or little of themselves or their wives:
Again, in the relations of men and women, we see outside the Christian Church a region of darkness and passion. The subordination of the wife to the husband is distorted, and she is made a plaything or a drudge. The equality of men and women is distorted, and the two sexes are treated as though they were not merely equal, but alike. The bonds of marriage are found too burdensome for passion, and have to be enlarged by polygamy or divorce, and even then are found too narrow.
Men and women, as St. Thomas Aquinas explains, are equally human but not equal as males and females. Only Christianity clarifies these subtleties.
‘The Christian religion preserves in family life, as in other matters, the golden mean between excess and defect, and tells us the plain truth about human nature and our position as created beings, and will not suffer us to reason as though we were our own masters and had made ourselves; but tells us that this is unreasonable, like silly children who argue when they should listen and learn; nor again will suffer us to live in a fool's paradise, and sustain our domestic virtue or our patriotism by sentiments, impulses, prejudices, superstitions; but dissipates these mists, and gives us a reasonable ground for our conduct, being the only reasonable religion, equally remote from the cynic and the fanatic.
Finally — and this is a very practical matter, and the issue of this book — we say that the highest and best family life possible for man is reached by Christianity, and that there is no evolution beyond, unless we call evolution a descent into an abyss. And we say, and this will hardly be denied, that for the great bulk of mankind, who must toil for their daily bread, there is in this world no source of happiness, no recreation from their toil, to be compared to that afforded them by a good family life, that is, by a home where, between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, there is union, affection, and peace. The cultivated and wealthy few may make up in some sort of way for the lack of these by an abundance of sensual and intellectual enjoyments. But these substitutes — they are but sorry substitutes — for a happy home, cannot be got by the great multitude. Hence it follows that those who would overthrow the Christian family are the arch-enemies of the happiness of the great multitude, and this in spite of all their protestations, all their professions of benevolence.
It has often been pointed out that by taking away from the poorer classes the sure hope of a future life, with its rewards and punishments, you have taken away the chief reason for their patience under the trials, and submission under the inequalities, of the present life, and that you prepare the way for outbreaks of Communism. This is quite true; but there is something more. The teachers of irreligion have not merely robbed the poor of their prospective inheritance, of the hope of goods to come; they have done more, and robbed them of the chief of their present goods, their Christian home life. It is an incomparable loss, for which all the devices of Socialists, and State Socialists, and Philanthropy, all the panaceas of State insurance, free schools, free libraries, free museums, free entertainments, free land, all grants, and subsidies, and franchises, and flattery, are worth nothing as a compensation. How can you compensate for freezing up men's hearts, for putting discord instead of peace, for putting indifference or dislike, instead of filial piety and brotherly love?
Let us not, therefore, deceive ourselves about the choice that lies before us. We cannot alter the past, or be as though England (and the case is the same for America) had never been a Christian country, never had the light. We must of necessity be either Christian or After-Christian. We may follow if we like the new doctrines and leaders, and clothe ourselves with the shreds and tatters which they have ingeniously manufactured into a kind of shoddy religion of literature, humanity, or science. Only let us not think this make-belief creed will be any refuge in sorrow, any restraint upon passion. We shall get no more help from it than they got in rationalistic Athens and Rome from the worship of Pallas Athene and the Capitoline Jove. It is not a mere accident that so many of the After-Christian heroes like Rousseau and Goethe, Shelley and Schopenhauer, appear so shocking in their private life. It is not a mere accident that the popular writers of After-Christian France, in the writings they miscall naturalism, have surpassed in filth the writings which the later Greeks were plainspoken enough to call pornography. These are signs of the times… Belief in man will go when we have given up belief in God, and affection will be as little at home among us as chastity. Nor let any one flatter himself with dreams of philanthropy. For we must not hide from ourselves the truth, as a wise man has put it, that worship is the only real incompatibility with self. But our new teachers forbid all genuine worship. Thus to seem not to seek ourselves is only more elaborate self-seeking; and philanthropy without God appears at best but self-delusion and folly.
The Christian home likewise partakes of the nature of the Christian religion; and drawing all its virtue from on high, appears as an image and an earnest of what is to come. The union of husband and wife, the authority of the parents, the obedience of the children, the order and affection, are fore-gleams of the eternal peace and indissoluble love in the home of the heavenly Father.
These doctrines indeed of the Christians we may disbelieve, and their mode of living we may dislike, and may follow other ideals and aims. We may choose or we may reject the Christian faith and rule of life; and so far we are free, so far we have a choice. But the consequences we cannot choose.
As a boy, Devas studied at Eton, where I taught before being fired for a lecture on masculinity that I think he would have agreed with. As a political economist, he devoted his career to the service of religion. As a man, after getting married at age 26, he generously and faithfully raised nine children with his wife before his death, seven years after hers, at age 58.