asily enter strife, bickerings, or
baseness. One short period, five minutes or even less, of quietness, of
united turning toward the eternal, gives tone to the day and finer
atmosphere to the home.

What our community life might be like without the churches, faulty or
incompetent as we may know some of them to be, what that life would lose
and miss without them is precisely, and perhaps in larger degree, what
the family life misses without its own institution of regular devotion
and worship.

Sec. 4. THE DIFFICULTIES

We can always afford to do that which is most worth while doing; our
essential difficulty is to shake off the delusion of the lesser values,
the lower prizes, to realize that, of all the good of life, the
characters of our children, the gain we can all make in the eternal
values of the spirit, in love and joy and truth and goodness, is the
gain most worth while. We tend to set the making of a living before the
making of lives. We need to see the development of the powers of
personality, the riches of character, as the ultimate, dominant purpose
of all being. Once grasp that, and hold to it, and we shall not allow
lesser considerations, such as the pressure of business, the desire for
gain, for ease, for pleasure, for social life, to come before this first
and highest good; we shall make time for definite conscious religion in
the life of the family.[25]

Sec. 5. TYPES OF WORSHIP

There are three simple forms which worship takes in the family: first,
grace offered at the meals; secondly, the prayers of children on
retiring and, occasionally, on rising; thirdly, the daily gathering of
the family for an act of the spirit. The statement of the three forms
reads so as to give them a formal character, but the most important
point to remember is that wherever they are true acts of worship they
are formal only in that they occur at definite, determined times and
places. The acts have no merit in themselves. Merely to institute their
observance will not secure religious feeling and life in the home. These
three observances have arisen because at these times there is the best
and most natural opportunity for the expression of aspiration, desire,
and feeling.

Sec. 6. METHODS OF FAMILY WORSHIP

1. _Grace at meals._--Shall we say grace at meals? To assent because it
is the custom, or because it was so done in our childhood's home, may
make an irreligious mockery of the act. Perhaps, too, there are some