ABSTRACT
In the land which cradled Christianity, and in the lands to which it originally spread, life and thought were shaped and dominated by the principle which sociologists, since Ferdinand Tönnies, have come to call community. A community, in contradistinction to an association, as found in other, and especially more modern, societies, is a close-knit unity; indeed, it is a unit in the full and firm sense of the word. As Aristotle would have expressed it, in these formations the whole is before the parts, not only in the order of time, but also in the order of existence. By this last phrase I mean that the whole is considered to be more real than the part. Not only are the parents there before the children, but the very being of the children is derived, secondary, adventitious; and it is so, not only in relation to the immediate progenitors, father and mother, but in relation to all the antecedent generations back through the centuries. Real is in the first place the family tree; it is considered more real than its branches, twigs and leaves; real is the stream of life, the ongoing society, rather than the individual persons in which it finds incidental and ephemeral expression and incarnation.
