Prayer | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 20, 1872

Prayer.

The duty of prayer cannot be too faithfully performed. A few reasons in favor of private and family prayer are given by Paley, in his Philosophy. He says:—

“Private wants cannot always be made the subject of public prayer; but whatever reason there is for praying at all, there is the same for making the sore and grief of each man’s own heart the business of his application to God. This must be the office of private exercises of devotion, being imperfectly, if at all, practicable in any other.

“Private prayer is generally more devout and earnest than the share we are capable of taking in joint acts of worship; because it affords leisure and opportunity for the circumstantial recollection of those personal wants, by the remembrance and ideas of which the warmth and earnestness of prayer are chiefly excited.

“Private prayer, in proportion as it is usually accompanied with more actual thought and reflection of the petitioner’s own, has a greater tendency than other modes of devotion to revive and fasten upon the mind the general impressions of religion. Solitude powerfully assists this effect. When a man finds himself alone in communication with his Creator, his imagination becomes filled with a conflux of awful ideas concerning the universal agency and invisible presence of that Being; concerning what is likely to become of himself; and of the superlative importance of providing for the happiness of his future existence, by endeavors to please Him who is the arbiter of his destiny: reflections which, whenever they gain admittance, for a season overwhelm all others; and leave, when they depart, a solemnity upon the thought that will seldom fail, in some degree, to affect the conduct of life.

“Private prayer, thus recommended by its own propriety, and by advantages not attainable in any form of religious communion, receives a superior sanction from the authority and example of Christ: ‘When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.’ ‘And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray.’ Matt. 6: 6; 14: 23.

“The peculiar use of family piety consists in its influence upon servants, and the young members of a family, who lack sufficient seriousness and reflection to retire of their own accord to the exercise of private devotion, and whose attention you cannot easily command in public worship. The example also and authority of a father and master act in this way with the greatest force; for his private prayers, to which his children and servants are not witnesses, act not at all upon them as examples; and his attendance upon public worship they will readily impute to fashion, to a care to preserve appearances, to a concern for decency and character, and to many motives besides a sense of duty to God. Add to this, that forms of public worship, in proportion as they are more comprehensive, are always less interesting than family prayers; and that the ardor of devotion is better supported, and the sympathy is more easily propagated, through a small assembly, connected by the affections of domestic society, than in the presence of a mixed congregation.”