ur of family devotion should be the
children's hour,--held dear as the interval when the busy father drops
his business and cares, and, like Jesus of old, takes the little ones
in his arms and blesses them. The child should remember it as the time
when the father always seemed most accessible and loving. The old
family worship of New England lacked this character of domesticity and
intimacy,--it was stately and formal, distant and cold; but, whatever
were its defects, I cannot think it an improvement to leave it out
altogether, as too many good sort of people in our day are doing.
There may be practical religion where its outward daily forms are
omitted, but there is assuredly no more of it for the omission. No man
loves God and his neighbor _less_, is a _less_ honest and good man,
for daily prayers in his household,--the chances are quite the other
way; and if the spirit of love rules the family hour, it may prove the
source and spring of all that is good through the day. It seems to be
a solemn duty in the parents thus to make the Invisible Fatherhood
real to their children, who can receive this idea at first only
through outward forms and observances. The little one thus learns that
his father has a Father in heaven, and that the earthly life he is
living is only a sacrament and emblem,--a type of the eternal life
which infolds it, and of more lasting relations there. Whether,
therefore, it be the silent grace and silent prayer of the Friends, or
the form of prayer of ritual churches, or the extemporaneous
outpouring of those whose habits and taste lead them to extempore
prayer, in one of these ways there should be daily outward and visible
acts of worship in every family."

"Well, now," said Bob, "about this old question of Sunday-keeping,
Marianne and I are much divided. I am always for doing something that
she thinks isn't the thing."

"Well, you see," said Marianne, "Bob is always talking against our old
Puritan fathers, and saying all manner of hard things about them. He
seems to think that all their ways and doings must of course have been
absurd. For my part, I don't think we are in any danger of being too
strict about anything. It appears to me that in this country there is
a general tendency to let all sorts of old forms and observances float
down-stream, and yet nobody seems quite to have made up his mind what
shall come next."

"The fact is," said I, "that we realize very fully all the objections
and d