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 chi