Family worship lifts the whole level of family life.  Ideally conceived, it simply means the family unity consciously coming into its highest place.  Children may not understand all the reading nor enter into the motives for all parts of the petition, but they do feel that this moment is the one in which the family enters a holy place.  They feel that God is real and that their family life is a part of his whole care and of his life.  One short period of natural reverence sends light and calm all through the day.  Where the home is the place where true prayer is offered, the family is the group which meets in an act of worship; here and into this group there cannot easily enter strife, bickerings, or baseness.  One short period, five minutes or even less, of quietness, of united turning toward the eternal, gives tone to the day and finer atmosphere to the home.

What our community life might be like without the churches, faulty or incompetent as we may know some of them to be, what that life would lose and miss without them is precisely, and perhaps in larger degree, what the family life misses without its own institution of regular devotion and worship.

Sec. 4.  THE DIFFICULTIES

We can always afford to do that which is most worth while doing; our essential difficulty is to shake off the delusion of the lesser values, the lower prizes, to realize that, of all the good of life, the characters of our children, the gain we can all make in the eternal values of the spirit, in love and joy and truth and goodness, is the gain most worth while.  We tend to set the making of a living before the making of lives.  We need to see the development of the powers of personality, the riches of character, as the ultimate, dominant purpose of all being.  Once grasp that, and hold to it, and we shall not allow lesser considerations, such as the pressure of business, the desire for gain, for ease, for pleasure, for social life, to come before this first and highest good; we shall make time for definite conscious religion in the life of the family.[25]

Sec. 5.  TYPES OF WORSHIP

There are three simple forms which worship takes in the family:  first, grace offered at the meals; secondly, the prayers of children on retiring and, occasionally, on rising; thirdly, the daily gathering of the family for an act of the spirit.  The statement of the three forms reads so as to give them a formal character, but the most important point to remember is that wherever they are true acts of worship they are formal only in that they occur at definite, determined times and places.  The acts have no merit in themselves.  Merely to institute their observance will not secure religious feeling and life in the home.  These three observances have arisen because at these times there is the best and most natural opportunity for the expression of aspiration, desire, and feeling.