FAMILY RELIGION by De Witt Talmage

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 6, 1893

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 19, No. 14.

FAMILY RELIGION.

By De Witt Talmage

WHILE we are to use common sense in every direction respecting a child, the first thing is to strive for its conversion, and there is nothing more potent than family prayers. No child ever gets over having heard his parents pray for him. We had many sound thrashings when a boy, but the most memorable scene of all was father and mother at morning and evening prayers. Your son may go to the ends of the earth, and run through the whole catalogue of transgression, but he will remember the family altar, and it will be a check and a call and perhaps his redemption.

Family prayers are often of no use. Perhaps they are too hurried. We have so much before us of the day's work that we hustle the children together. We get half through the chapter before the family are seated. We read as if we are reading for a wager. We drop on our knees, and are in the second or third sentence before they all get down. It is an express train, with amen for the first depot.

Better have given them a kiss all around; it would have taken less time and would have been more acceptable to God and them.

Family prayers often fail in adaptedness. Do not read for the morning lesson a genealogical chapter or about Sampson's setting the foxes' tails on fire. For all the good your children get from such reading you might as well have read a Chinese almanac. Rather give the story of Jesus and the children climbing into his arms, or the lad with the loaves and fishes, or the Sea of Galilee dropping to sleep under Christ's lullaby. Stop and ask questions. Make the exercises so interesting that little Johnny will stop playing with his shoe strings and Jenny will quit rubbing the cat's fur the wrong way. Let the prayer be pointed and made up of small words, and no wise information to the Lord about things he knows without your telling him. Let the children feel that they are prayed for. Have a hymn if any of you can sing. Let the season be spirited, appropriate, and gladly solemn.—T. De Witt Talmage.