Opening Article on Family Prayer to Parents:

I wish, in this opening article, to make a sincere appeal to parents about the important duty of family prayer. In doing this, I will assume but one thing as an accepted point a thing which may commonly, or at least, be assumed without danger of a mistake. It is that you feel a deep interest in the welfare of your children; and are willing to make use of any proper means to promote their happiness. This point I assume, because the God of nature has so established us, that as a great universal rule parents will love their children; and because no small part of their efforts are called out with express, and almost sole reference to their present and future happiness.

You, who are parents, will instantly run over in your minds, many of the tenderest and moving scenes of watchfulness, care, anxiety, sleeplessness and the hard work you go through, to provide for their wants, ease their pains, defend them from danger, and train them for future respectability and happiness. The most loving emotions in your heart now, relate to them. Your deepest interest is to see them upright, friendly and happy. You would run to their relief in danger, and deny yourself of ease to lessen their pains in sickness. Your brightest visions of future bliss in this world are with their welfare. The loveliest view in the future is when they stand out, pure and happy, in bold relief, single, or in lovely groups.

The chief comfort in the outlook of your future trials; in the anticipated days of weakness and pain, and in the misery and fatigue of advancing age; is that our sons will live to help you by his labor, or to cheer your last days by his merits. Or that our daughters, lovely and tenderly, will come around your bed, and mingle her tears with yours, and catch your last breath. And with a gentle hand close your eyes as you sink into the long sleep of the next life.

I wish to show you that family prayer will be one of the most important helps in meeting your wishes in regard to your 1st place, in the design of the family group. God could have built-in a world of independent individuals, bound by nothing, no common compassion; cheered on by no common joys or encouraged by no common wants. All that is tender in the parental and the experiencing of affection from the child and all that is mild, bland, and peaceful in love: and all that is sympathetic in sorrow, and in joy; could have been denied us. As solitary beings, we would have wept alone, rejoiced alone, thought alone and died alone. The sun would have shed its beams around our lonely walk in life, and not a single human mortal would have felt an interest in our happiness or sadness. Mankind would have lived without help from the experience of our relatives; and with no one to shed a tear for us at the bedside that we would lie down in sickness, and because no one cared, we would have died there alone.

But, thank God, this is not the way in which God has chosen for us to live. He has made the race one great brotherhood. That is why we do feel some interest at least, in the obscurest of people that seek a shelter below a rock, or the ones that only have their home in a tent, or in a cave. “I am a man, and I regard nothing pertaining to man as unimportant to me"-this was the language of an ancient dramatist, and a theatre rang with applauses at this noble feeling. This great brotherhood God has wisely broken up into communities of nations, and clans, and tribes, and families, and neighborhoods. Each with its own set of sympathies, with peculiar interests and with peculiar resources. One design is, to divide our sorrows by sympathetic emotions and the other is to double our joys by imparting them to others who sympathize with us. Sorrow does not have half its pain when you can combine your tears with those of a friend; and joy does not have all of its consent until your joy has lighted up the face of your father, or touched the understanding of our brother or sister.