OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIH. 45
the duty of the father, and is therefore requisite and just, because
It is a most sacred law of nature that a father must provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten ; and, similarly, nature dictates that a man's children, who carry on, as it were, and continue his own personality, should be provided by him with all that is needful to enable them honorably to keep themselves from want and misery in the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now, in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of profitable property, which he can transmit to his children by inheri- tance. (14.)
Thanks to Him who has bound the generations of men together by a provision that brings the tenderest love to greet our entrance into the world and soothes our exit with filial piety, it is both the duty and the joy of the father to care for the child till its powers mature, and afterwards in the natural order it becomes the duty and privilege of the child to be the stay of the parent. This is the natural reason for that relation of marriage, the groundwork of the sweetest, tenderest and purest of human joys, which the Catholic Church has guarded with such unremitting vigilance.
We do, for a few years, need the providence of our fathers after the flesh. But how small, how transient, how narrow is this need, as compared with our constant need for the providence of Him in whom we live, move and have our being Our Father who art in Heaven! It is to him, " the giver of every good and perfect gift," and not to our fathers after the flesh, that Christ taught us to pray, " Give us this day our daily bread." And how true it is that it is through him that the generations of men exist ! Let the mean temperature of the earth rise or fall a few degrees, an amount as nothing compared with differences produced in our laboratories, and man- kind would disappear as ice disappears under a tropical
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