Family Prayers by Canon Liddon

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 2, 1910

Family Prayers

By Canon Liddon

THERE is one mark of a household in which God is known and loved, which is too often wanting in our day—I mean the practise of family prayer. Depend upon it, the worth of a practise of that kind can only be measured by its effects during a long period of time; and family prayers, though occupying only a few minutes, do make a great difference in any household at the end of a year. How, indeed, can it be otherwise, when each morning, and perhaps each evening too, all the members of the family—the old and the young, the parents and the children, the master and the servants—meet on a footing of perfect equality before the Eternal, in whose presence each is as nothing, yet to whom each is so infinitely dear that he has redeemed by his blood each and all of them? How must not the bad spirits that are the enemies of pure, bright family life flee away,—the spirits of envy and pride and untruthfulness and sloth, and the whole tribe of evil thoughts,—and make way for the presence, in the hearts of old and young alike, of Him who, as he brings us one by one nearer to the true end of our existence, makes us to be ‘of one mind’ within the narrow confines of each home circle, and hereafter in that countless family of all nations and tongues, which shall dwell with him, the universal Parent of all eternity?—Canon Liddon.