Family Prayer by Dr. Bushnell

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 10, 1863

Family Prayer.

By Dr. Bushnell

THE grand infirmity of family prayers, or what is sometimes called family religion, is that it stands alone in the house, and has nothing put in agreement with it. Whereas, if it is to have any honest reality, as many things as possible should be soberly and deliberately put in agreement with it; for, indeed, it is a first point of religion itself, that by its very nature it rules presidingly over every thing desired, done, thought, planned for, and prayed for in this life. It is never to finish itself up by words, or supplications, or even by sacraments, but the whole custom of life and character must be in it by a total consent of the man. And more depends on this a hundred times, than upon any occasional fervors, or passionate flights, or agonizings.

The grand defect will, in almost all cases, be in what is more deliberate, viz., in the want of any downright, honest casting of the family in the type of religion, and as if that were truly accepted as the first thing.

See just what is wanted, by what is so very commonly not found. First of all, the mere observance kind of piety, that which prays in the family to keep up a reverent show, or acknowledgment of religion, is not enough. It leaves everything else in the life to be an open space for covetousness, and all the gay lustings of worldly vanity. It even leaves out prayer; for the saying of prayers is, in no sense, really the same thing as to pray. Contrary to this, there should be some real prayer, for the meaning's sake, and for the shell of religious decency, in which the semblance may be kept. This latter kind looks, indeed, for no return of blessing from God, but only for a certain religious effect accomplished by the drill of repetitional observance. There is also another kind of drill sometimes attempted in the prayers of families, which is much worse, viz., when the prayer is made every morning, to hit this or that child in some matter of disobedience, or some mere peccadillo into which he has fallen. Nothing can be more irreverent to God, than to make the hour of prayer a time of prison discipline for the subjects of it, and nothing could more certainly set them in a fixed aversion to religion, and to everything sacred. This kind of prayer prays, in fact, for exasperation's sake, and the effect will correspond.