few topics, and those should be presented in the most simple way possible. The practice of praying for every body and every thing, in every prayer, has a direct tendency to destroy all the effects of devotion. Historical prayers-prayers beginning with the creation of man, and tracing all his history to the times of the millennium, repeated from one day to another, soon disgust and weary any audience, and soonest of all, a family. Till men learn to concentrate their feelings, and have really some object for which they wish to pray-an object in which they feel some interest, the business of praying will be dull, monotonous, disgusting. 4. Prayer should be solemn. It should not be a matter of form. Nor should it be in an affected tone, or mock solemnity. Few audiences understand the real nature of such prayers, sooner than a family. The God whom you worship is not an idol. Your wants are not fictions. Your sins are real. The dangers of your children are mighty and pressing. Your relation to God and eternity, is not a cold formality. It has every thing to thrill, to pierce, to awe, to overwhelm. And coldness, and spiritual death, become any place better than the family altar. Let the snows of Greenland, and the ice of the northern seas, be in any other place of devotion, rather than on that where you plead with God for the guidance and salvation of your sons and daughters. 5. Prayer should be regular. It is not the business of the sabbath merely; nor of scenes of affliction merely; nor a matter to be attended to when you are not otherwise employed. It is to be the real business of the family-a part of its systematic organization, and employment. Without this its interest will expire. When I plead with you that God be acknowledged in your family, I plead that it may enter into your plans, that religion is to be a prominent part of the design for which you live. 6. Family prayer should obviously be connected with instruction, and especially with the perusal of the Holy Scriptures. Its interest may also be heightened, and its great ends furthered, by making it the occasion of celebrating the praises of God, by psalms and hymns. I add 7. That it should be the offering of the family. I deem this remark of more importance than any one which I have made. When I say that it should be the offering of the family, I mean that it should enter into the plan, and the arrangement, that children, and servants, should be present at the time of devotion. I make the observation, because it is so easy to forget that our servants are a part of the family, or that they have any sympathies in common with us. Whoever looks into the epistles of Paul, will see that the religious treatment of servants occupies a large place in his instructions to the churches. It is clear, that proper religious attention will not be shown to them, unless it is made a matter of conscience with you to admit them to the privileges of family prayer. They are a part of your family. They are under your care. Their religious instruction is to be subject to your control. And it is perfectly manifest that their attachment to you, their fidelity, their good conduct, can be in no way so effectually secured as to admit them to the privileges of the Christian, and share with them the hopes of the mercy of heaven, and the favour of God. If you wish to secure their attachment, show them that you are interested in their religious welfare. If you wish to bind them to your family, admit them to the privileges of that religion, where there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free; but where Christ is all and in all. These great interests you have in common. The hopes of heaven may be theirs, as well as yours. And rank, and wealth, and the relation of master, afford no passport to the favour of God, and confer no elevation before the throne of grace. Besides, there is no so effectual way of producing humility, kindness, and fidelity, among servants, as by imbuing them with a knowledge of that religion which recognises their condition, teaches them their duty, and makes them prayerful and conscientious. Before the throne of God masters and servants should bow in common. They will soon stand at a common bar of judgment. And it is well even for the rich and the powerful, to feel every day, that in the great interests of human existence, wealth and splendour confer no prerogatives; and that those poor, dependent, and ignorant, have spirits precious as our own, and that it is ours to attempt to raise them up to the blessings of redemption, and that there is no respect of persons with God. The same remarks are applicable to your children. The evil of disorganized families results from irregularity in their attendance on family devotion. Indulge them in sleep; or suffer them to be absent amid the scenes of gaiety, fashion, splendour, or dissipation, at the regular times of devotion, and it is not difficult to foresee what will be the character of your sons and daughters. Deeds of wickedness are commonly literally deeds of darkness; and more than half the evils inflicted on a community, result from the want of power or inclination of parents to restrain, and bind to proper hours, and times, the headlong, and daring propensities of children. That parent, in my view, greatly fails in his duty, and is pointing thorns for a future pillow, who suffers his children to be absent from his view at the proper seasons of devotion. Summon them to your side, and present them before God; and there, if any where, they are safe. In conclusion, I remark, that there is not on earth a scene more interesting than a family thus bending before the God of heaven. A collection of dependent beings, with tender feelings, with lively sympathies, with common hopes, fears, joys, blending their bliss, and their woes together, and presenting them all to the King of kings, and the Great Father of all the families of mankind. There is not on earth a man more to be venerated, or that will be more venerated, than the father who thus ministers at the family altar. No other man, like that father, so reaches all the sources of human action, or so gently controls the powers yielding in their first years, and following the direction of his moulding hand, that are soon to control all that is tender and sacred in the interests of the church and state. No Solon or Lycurgus is laying the foundation of codes of laws so eep, or taking so fast a hold on all that is to affect the resent or future destiny of man. We love, therefore, to look at such venerable locks; and to contemplate these ministers of God which stand between the rising generation-feeble, helpless, and exposed to a thousand perilsand the Eternal Parent of all. They stand between the past and the coming age-remnants of the one, and lights to the other; binding the past with that which is to come; living lights of experience to guide the footsteps of the ignorant and erring; to illuminate the coming generation to obtain for it blessings by counsel and prayer, and then to die. And if the earth contains, amid its desolations, one spot of green on which the eye of God reposes with pleasure, it is the collected group, with the eye of the father raised to heaven, and the voice of faith and prayer commending the little worshippers to the protecting care of Him who never slumbers nor sleeps. The inimitable language of Burns, on this subject, is not fiction. In hundreds of families you might witness all that is pure and sublime in the scene contemplated by the Scottish bard. 66 They chant their artless notes in simple guise: The tickl'd ears no heart-felt raptures raise; "The priest-like father reads the sacred page, With Amalek's ungracious progeny; Beneath the stroke of Heaven's avenging ire; Or rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire; "Perhaps the Christian volume is the theme, How guiltless blood for guilty. man was shed; How He, who bore in heaven the second name, Had not on earth whereon to lay his head: How his first followers and servants sped; The precepts sage they wrote to many a land; How he who lone in Patmos banished, Saw in the sun a mighty angel stand; And heard great Bab'lon's doom pronounc'd by Heaven's command. "Then kneeling down, to Heaven's Eternal King, No more to sigh, or shed the bitter tear, In such society, yet still more dear; While circling time moves round in an eternal sphere.” |