The great defect of family religion in the present day is, that it is not educational.  Parents wait until their children have grown up, and established habits of sin, when they suppose that the efforts of some “protracted meeting” will compensate for their neglect in childhood.  They overlook the command of God to teach them His words.  The influence of this defect and delusion has been most destructive.  Many Christian homes are now altogether destitute of religious appliances.  If the angel that visited the homes of Israel were to visit the Christian homes of this age, would he not be tempted to say, as Abraham said to Abimelech, “Surely the fear of God is not in this place!”

One great reason, perhaps, why there are so many such homes is, that there are now so many irreligious marriages, where husband and wife are “unequally yoked together,” one a believer and the other not.  “How can two walk together except they be agreed?” Can there be family religion when husband and wife are traveling to eternity in opposite roads?  No!  There will be hindrances instead of “helps.”  If they marry not “in the Lord,” religion will not be in their home.  Says the pious Jay, “I am persuaded that it is very much owing to the prevalence of these indiscriminate and unhallowed connections, that we have fallen so far short of those men of God, who are gone before us, in the discharge of family worship, and in the training up of our households in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”

Family religion is implied in the marriage relation and obligation.  It is included in the necessities of our children, and in the covenant promises of God.  The penalties of its neglect, and the rewards of our faithfulness to it, should prompt us to its establishment in our homes.  Its absence is a curse; its presence a blessing.  It is a foretaste of heaven.  Like manna, it will feed our souls, quench our thirst, sweeten the cup of life, and shed a halo of glory and of gladness around our firesides.  Let yours, therefore, be the religious home; and then be sure that God will delight to dwell therein, and His blessing will descend, like the dews of heaven, upon it.  Your children shall “not be found begging bread,” but shall be like “olive plants around your table,”—­the “heritage of the Lord.”  Yours will be the home of love and harmony; it shall have the charter of family rights and privileges, the ward of family interests, the palladium of family hopes and happiness.  Your household piety will be the crowning attribute of your peaceful home,—­the “crown of living stars” that shall adorn the night of its tribulation, and the pillar of cloud and of fire in its pilgrimage to a “better country.”  It shall strew the family threshold with the flowers of promise, and enshrine the memory of loved ones gone before, in all the fragrance of that “blessed hope” of reunion in heaven which looms up from a dying hour.  It shall give to the infant soul its “perfect flowering,” and expand it in all the fullness of a generous love and conscious blessedness, making it “lustrous in the livery of divine knowledge.”  And then in the dark hour of home separation and bereavement, when the question is put to thee, mourning parents, “Is it well with the child? is it well with thee?” you can answer with joy, “It is well!”