Should we say grace on all occasions of meals?  What shall we do at the social dinner in the home?  The answer depends on the purpose of the grace.  Is it not that in our own group we may have the consciousness of the presence of God?  When the meal is that of our own group with a friend or two, we bring the friends into the group and the act of family worship is maintained.  Usually this is the case.  So it will be when the group is entirely at one in this desire:  the asking of grace will be perfectly natural.  But when the group is a large one, when the sense of family unity is lost, or when the observance would seem unnatural, it is better to omit it.  Grace in large gatherings often seems an uncovering of the sacred aspects of the home life.

2. Bedtime prayers.—­What of children’s bedtime prayers?  Many can remember them.  To many the most natural, helpful time for formal periods of prayer is in the quiet of the bedroom just before retiring.  But there is a grave danger in establishing a regular custom of bedside prayers for children, a danger manifest in the very form of certain of these prayers, as

    Now I lay me down to sleep,
    I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

It is as though the child were saying, “The day is ended during which I have been able to take care of myself, the hours of helpless sleep begin, and I ask God to take care of me through the terrors of the night.”  For some children, at least, the night has been made terrible by that thought; they have been led to feel that the day was safe and beautiful, but that the night was so dangerous and fearful that only the great God could keep them through it, and it was an open question whether their prayer for that keeping would be heard.

One must avoid also the notion that such prayers are part of a price paid, a system of daily taxation in return for which heaven furnishes us police protection.

The best plan seems to be to encourage children to pray, to establish in them the habit of closing the day with quiet, grateful thoughts, to watch especially that the prayers learned in early life do not distort the child’s thoughts of God, and to make the evening prayer an opportunity for the child to express his desires to God his Father and Friend.  Having done this, as the children grow up it is best to leave them free to pray when and where they will.  One may properly encourage the evening, private prayer; but the child ought to have the feeling that it is not obligatory, that it must grow out of his desire to talk with God, and, above all, that it has no special connection with the hour and act of retiring for sleep but rather, so far as time is concerned, with the closing of the day.  Mothers must see far beyond the charm of the picture formed by the little white-robed figure at her knee.  There is no hour so rich in possibilities for this growing life.  It is one of the great opportunities to guide its consciousness of God.[28]