Chapter 63

FAMILY PRAYERS.

Take first the statement that unless our children are saved in early life they probably never will be. They who go over the twentieth year without Christ are apt to go all the way without Him. Grace, like flower-seed, needs to be sown in spring. The first fifteen years of life, and often the first six, decide the eternal destiny.

The first thing to do with a lamb is to put it in the arms of the Great Shepherd. Of course we must observe natural laws. Give a child excessive meat diet, and it will grow up sensual, and catechism three times a day, and sixty grains in each dose, won't prevent it. Talk much in your child's presence about the fashions, and it will be fond of dress, notwithstanding all your lectures on humility. Fill your house with gossip, and your children will tattle. Culture them as much as you will, but give them plenty of money to spend, and they will go to destruction.

But 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 parents pray for him. I had many sound threshings when I was a boy (not as many as I ought to have had, for I was the last child and my parents let me off), but the most memorable scene in my childhood was father and mother at morning and evening prayers. I cannot forget it, for I used often to be squirming around on the floor and looking at them while they were praying. 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 must hustle the children together. We get half through the chapter before the family are seated. We read as if we were reading for a wager. We drop on our knees, are in the second or third sentence before they all get down. It is an express train, with amen for the first depot. We rush for the hat and overcoat, and are on the way to the store, leaving the impression that family prayers are a necessary nuisance, and we had better not have had any gathering of the family at all. 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 Samson setting the foxes' tails on fire, or the prophecy about the horses, black and red, and speckled, unless you explain why they were speckled. 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 exercise 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 they are prayed for. Have a hymn if any of you can sing. Let the season be spirited, appropriate and gladly solemn.

Family prayer also fails when the whole day is not in harmony with it. A family prayer, to be worth anything, ought to be twenty-four hours long. It ought to give the pitch to all the day's work and behavior. The day when we get thoroughly mad upsets the morning devotion. The life must be in the same key with the devotion.

Family prayer is infinitely important. If you are a parent, and are not a professor of religion, and do not feel able to compose a prayer, get some one of the many books that have been written, put it down before you, and read prayers for the household. God has said that He will "pour out His fury upon the family that call not upon His name."

Prayer for our children will be answered. My grandmother was a praying woman. My father's name was David. One day, he and other members of the family started for a gay party. Grandmother said: "Go, David, and enjoy yourself; but all the time you and your brothers and sisters are there, I will be praying for you." They went, but did not have a very good time, knowing that their mother was praying for them.

The next morning, grandmother heard loud weeping in the room below. She went down and found her daughter crying violently. What was the matter? She was in anxiety about her soul--an anxiety that found no relief short of the cross. Word came that David was at the barn in great agony. Grandmother went and found him on the barn floor, praying for the life of his soul.

The news spread to the neighboring houses, and other parents became anxious about their children, and the influence spread to the village of Somerville, and there was a great turning unto God; and over two hundred souls, in one day, stood up in the village church to profess faith in Christ. And it all started from my grandmother's prayer for her sons and daughters. May God turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest He come and smite the earth with a curse!