CHAPTER III.
THE FATHER "Who plants his soul in stalwart sons and daughters keeps on giving His life and vision to his fellow men; His power grows like leaven.
"His children strive to take his spirit up and keep it living; They share with all the love he gave his own, as he had shared, And lives, his love has served, all call him father." From the Tribute, _To My Father_, by HORNELL HART.
"To dwell in the wide house of the world; to stand in true attitude therein; in success to share one's principles with the people; in failure to live them out alone; to be incorruptible by riches or honor; unchangeable by poverty; unmoved by perils or power--these I call the qualities of a great man."-- MENCIUS.
"For the man who is such as no longer to delay being among the number of the best is like a priest and minister of the gods, using the deity that is planted within him, that which makes a man uncontaminated by any pleasure, unharmed by any pain, untouched by any insult, feeling no wrong, a fighter in the noblest fight, who cannot be overpowered by passion, one dyed deep with justice, understanding that only what belongs to himself is matter for his activity, yet remembering also that every human being is his kinsman, and that to care for all men is according to mans nature."-- MARCUS AURELIUS.
"'Tis not in battles that from youth we train The governor who must be wise and good.
Wisdom doth live with children round her knees; Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk Of the mind's business; this is the stalk True power doth grow on."-- WORDSWORTH.
=Historic Background of Fatherhood.=--The father seems to have had a precarious attachment to the family in earlier forms of life.

As Le Tourneau well says, "The animal family is especially maternal; although father birds often share parental duties, many mammals are less developed in duration and strength of affection." Fathers, mothers, and their offspring are not closely grouped in lower life.
The relation of the sexes, even when the human was reached, seems not to have carried with it a sense of the double obligation of parenthood.

"Marriage was brittle in the early times," says Sir John Lubbock.

The obvious relationship of mother and child, the lack of such irrefutable testimony to parenthood in the case of man, and other elements of primitive experience lending confusion to the situation, made it a process of time and a test of growing intelligence for men to learn that babies take two parents to give them birth.
When the human male did learn that he was a father, as his mate was a mother, it seems to have mentally intoxicated him, and led the way to many social vagaries.

The grotesque comedy of the couvade, which proved a tragedy so often for the poor mother compelled by the custom to rise in her weakness and even neglect her new-born baby, in order to do double work and to tempt the appetite of her lord after his make-believe pangs of childbirth, was one sign that primitive consciousness found the new knowledge of double parentage very exciting.
The varieties of phallic worship found in so many ages and among so many peoples show how man plumed himself upon the generative function and how he linked it with the god-idea.