Family Worship: Concluding Difficulties and Objections (1)

The fact that an observance so important and fruitful should be widely disregarded, even in Protestant churches, may well give rise to serious inquiry into the causes of such neglect. Misapprehensions, objections, and difficulties must certainly exist, or we should find it as universal as Sabbath worship.

Laying aside all flattering words, we may say plainly that we regard the neglect of family worship as springing from lukewarmness and worldliness in religion, and as a portentous evil of our day. Where piety is ardent and operative, it cannot but diffuse itself through the domestic structure. Where a man has the spirit of prayer, he will naturally be led to give vent to his devotion in fellowship with those whom he loves most of all on earth. We are ready to make allowance for the force of long habit and the religious usages of particular countries, and will not hastily condemn those who in the midst of popery and neology are governed by the customs of their vicinity. But even there we have already observed that as vital godliness advances, this service, or something equivalent, comes in by a natural suggestion, or rather by a suggestion of grace. And where the custom of Protestant churches abroad, in any region, authorizes the disuse of domestic prayer, we scruple not to refer the origin of this disuse to the decay of piety in a former age. We have good reason to believe that all the Reformation churches were acquainted with family prayer.

A great accession to the piety of a Christian house will manifest itself in nothing more speedily than in the necessity under which they will feel themselves laid—to come together in acts of worship. There may be persons who know not what it is. For one large class, however, no such apology can be made. They are sons of the church, introduced within its guardian care by baptism, and familiarized to the daily sanctuary, of which they can even now scarcely hear or think without recalling the image of a sainted father whose voice in their early years conducted them to the praise of God. When such persons, so instructed, establish households of their own, having a daily memento of their youthful privilege and their present neglect in every hour at which God was wont to be worshipped under the paternal roof, and still deny the faith of their childhood, they not only sin, but sin knowingly and inexcusably. Nothing but the absence of devout affections can account for such a life.

Where a man has the spirit of prayer, he will naturally be led to give vent to his devotion in fellowship with those whom he loves most of all on earth.

So great is our desire, however, to meet the neglecters of this service on any ground, that we will yield a ready attention to all their doubts, scruples, and objections. For this purpose no better way suggests itself than that of supposing the replies which may be made to our preceding urgent beseeching, that the reader would enter upon family worship forthwith. What arguments can we imagine, from his lips?

(1) “The service, as I have seen it, is a dull formality; and my house is as well without it.” Then you have seen it under great neglect or perversion. Like all religious services, it may be so conducted as to be both dull and formal. But no Christian observance known among men, admits of more life, and none is connected with more sources of tender affection. Very ignorant, very stupid, or very irreligious people may transform it into a tedious and burdensome routine, but this is no fault of the ordinance. They do the same with every sacred thing that they touch. We do not invite you to such a service or to any dead formality, but to that which under the influence of elevated emotion may be made, and is daily made, a delightful and animating means of grace. True, it is simple, and lacks all the paraphernalia, and posture, and grimace of antichristian rites, but in the households of the righteous it shines with a pure and hallowed attraction; and we appeal to those who have enjoyed it from their infancy, whether they do not regard it in retrospect with every feeling rather than that of weariness. Nay, the very reason why we would introduce the means under every roof is that it possesses in so remarkable a degree the quality of inspiring the liveliest emotion.

(2) “Family worship may be well enough in itself, but it does not fall in with the customs of my house and my guests.” This is with some a valid argument, and it must be admitted that there are customs of households and of society with which family worship will assuredly interfere. Such is the custom of late and irregular rising, agreeably to which the yawning inmates of a house straggle down to a breakfast table, which stands for hours awaiting the successive approaches of the solitary and moody participant. Another custom, that of passing a long evening—as it is called by the courtesy of fashion—at the theater, the card-party, the ball, or the not less unseasonable supper, or assembly. It is not the least of the advantages of domestic prayer that it stands in open daily protest against these growing observances of the mode.

Dr. James W. Alexander (1804-1859), eldest son of the renowned Archibald Alexander, wrote many volumes on practical Christian themes, including Plain Words to a Young Communicant (1854) and Thoughts on Preaching (1864). This article is drawn from his Thoughts on Family Worship (1847).

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