father equipped with all the refinement of feeling that Christianity provides is capable of joining forces with those resources that religion offers to protect the tender human plant from this blight and to raise a family that is pure and chaste. Marriages rashly concluded and dissolved cannot even come close to providing this kind of protection to the poor child helplessly exposed to these dangers. What would ultimately become of all the workers' children from rashly concluded and rashly dissolved marriage alliances like these, daily exposed to all the dangers of seduction and poor example? Physically dependent upon the most miserable makeshift assistance, without loving parental care and parental supervision, they would look for compensation for their miserable earthly existence in sexual indecency and would fall all the more quickly and surely into spiritual and physical ruin. Conditions like these are no figment of the imagination; rather, they are already developing everywhere in certain situations in which modern principles have penetrated the working masses and started to damage the purity of marriage and family life. One cannot help but think with profound melancholy about how this tendency is penetrating deeper into our German working class. The power of Christianity will prevent this, as will God, who stands by His Church omnipotently. Christian marriage with its elevated idea of indissolubility and holiness will oppose this poison in the human race with triumphant resistance. The Church will save marriage for the working class, and [it will save] the Christian family and the Christian heart of mothers and fathers for workers' children. This is but the first and most essential condition for solving the worker's question. As long as our workers still have the Christian family, the husband a Christian wife, the wife a Christian husband, the children Christian parents, the parents good Christian children who still know the Fourth Commandment [Ex. 20:12], as long as this is the case, the ruination of the working class faces a firm barrier that it can never cross.
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