WHEN TO TEACH CHILDREN TO PRAY.
To WAIT, as some people illogically advise, until children are old enough to understand about God before teaching them to pray, is to behave as nobody behaves in regard to any other thing under the sun. The sensible way is to do as a mother, whose children are among the best trained and best behaved I know, tells me she always does—namely, long before the child can talk, in the very dawning of intelligence, to clasp the tiny hands in hers, and say the little prayer, while yet it can only be mother's saying. The habit may be established by the time the baby is talking and walking, the blessed thing about it being, then, that the whole conscious life of the child will be fast bound to God. There will never be the memory of the time when the heart's burden was not rolled off at His feet, when the day did not begin and the evening close with a sweet Amen. As children grow older, they should learn to repeat reverently the Lord's Prayer, and should be encouraged in the tender bed-time talks with mama, which are mama's most precious opportunity for winning their confidence, and keeping them close to herself, to make prayers of their own. A child's day, like the day of a grown person, has its lights and shadows, its trials and anxieties. Temptation has met the little one on the playground, the street, or the school-room, and she has had her fit of naughtiness, her gusts of temper, or her disappointments, as great to her as her father's to him. So the child, as well as the adult, may learn the comfort of just resting on that precious truth, "He knows."—Christian Advocate.