The good and holy custom of family prayers is, I fear, dropping into disuse.  Our lives are so full of business that a season of God’s service in the morning and in the evening is almost thought to be an excuse of sloth.  But what a sad effect do we see on our youth!  They have quick eyes for cant and hypocrisy.  They follow us to church on Sunday less and less willingly, until finally there is rebellion in their hearts and irreligion in their souls.  Family worship is a fount of piety pure enough for even the young, who are pure themselves.  Into its depths they look and see only a chastity of spirit reflected.  The machinery and the ambition that adulterate the true faith at the church have not had their birth at the fireside of a good man.  At that fireside the child grows up religious, because he loves religion.  It is kind and good to him.  His shrine is at home.  And where can we ever build

SO HOLY AN ALTAR

as at that sweet spot where life has come in upon us, and love been wrapped around us!  Burns sees the humble cotter finish his family service in the presence of his little ones, and then, to show a further duteous regard for the souls intrusted to his care, kneel again with the wife: 

     The parent-pair their secret homage pay,
       And proffer up to Heaven the warm request,
     That he who stills the raven’s clamorous nest,
       And decks the lily fair in flowery pride. 
     Would in the way his wisdom sees the best,
       For them and for their little ones provide;
     But chiefly in their hearts with grace divine preside.

“From scenes like these old Scotia’s grandeur springs,” sings the sweet poet, and this very poem has touched a chord in the hearts of all humanity, in every clime, and nearly every tongue, that has almost doubled that Scotia’s fame.  “A house without family worship,” says Mason, “has neither foundation nor covering.”  “Measure not men by Sundays,” says Fuller, “without regarding what they do all the week after.”  “Educate men without religion,” said the Duke of Wellington, “and you make them but clever devils.”

THE IRON DUKE

was forced to fight one of the cleverest of this kind, and his victory was earned so hardly that he remembered it.  “The dullest observer must be sensible,” says Washington Irving, “of the order and serenity prevalent in those households where the occasional exercise of a beautiful form of worship in the morning gives, as it were, the key-note to every temper for the day, and attunes every spirit to harmony.”  “It is for the sake of man, not of God,” says Blair, “that worship and prayers are required; not that God may be rendered more glorious, but that men may be made better—­that he may acquire those pious and virtuous dispositions in which his highest improvement consists.”  How can religion bear fruit so well as by daily instruction from God?  How can the family bear its burdens more easily than with God’s help?