Let me, therefore, urge upon you, Christian parents, to make prayer a prominent element of your home.  You should be a priest unto your family,—­a leader in home-communion with God.  Your children have a right to expect this from you.  If you are a church member, how strange and startling must be the enunciation in heaven, that you are a prayerless Christian, and your home destitute of the altar!  And do you think that, continuing thus, you will be admitted into that heavenly home where there is one unbroken voice of prayer and praise to God?  Do you not tremble at the prospect of those tremendous denunciations which the Lord has uttered against those who neglect and abuse the privilege of prayer?  “Pour out thy fury upon the families that have not called upon thy name.”  Oh then, make your home a house of prayer; lead your little flock in sweet communion with God.  Establish in them the habit of devotion:  Shape their consciences by prayer.  In this way you shall secure for yourself and them the blessing of God:  His smile shall ever rest upon your household:  Salvation shall be the heritage of your children; they will grow up in the divine life; and will live amid the blessing’s of prayer, and be faithful to its requisitions: 

  “Hold the little hands in prayer, teach the weak knees their kneeling;
  Let him see thee speaking to thy God; he will not forget it afterwards;
  When old and gray will he feelingly remember a mother’s tender piety,
  And the touching recollection of her prayers shall arrest the strong man
    in his sin!”

CHAPTER XVI.

Home-education.

SECTION I.

The character of home education.

  “Scratch the green rind of a sapling, or wantonly twist it in the soil,
  The scarred and crooked oak will tell of thee for centuries to come;
  Wherefore, though the voice of instruction waiteth for the ear of reason,
  Yet with his mother’s milk the young child drinketh education.”

We come now to consider one of the most important features of the Christian home, viz., as a school for the education of character.  This is important because of its vital bearing upon the interests of home.  The parent is not only king and priest, but prophet in the family.  It is the first school.  We there receive a training for good or for evil.  There is not a word, nor an emotion, nor an act, nor even a look there, which does not teach the child something.  Character is ever being framed and moulded there.  Every habit there formed, and every action there performed, imply a principle which shall enter as an element into the future character of the child.