House and Home Papers / Seventh Edition

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

“There must be a home religion,” said my wife.

“I believe in home religion,” said Bob Stephens,—“but not in the outward show of it. The best sort of religion is that which one keeps at the bottom of his heart, and which goes up thence quietly through all his actions, and not the kind that comes through a certain routine of forms and ceremonies. Do you suppose family prayers, now, and a blessing at meals, make people any better?”

“Depend upon it, Robert,” said my wife,—she always calls him Robert on Sunday evenings,—“depend upon it, we are not so very much wiser than our fathers were, that we need depart from their good old ways. Of course I would have religion in the heart, and spreading quietly through the life; but does this interfere with those outward, daily acts of respect and duty which we owe to our Creator? It is too much the slang of our day to decry forms, and to exalt the excellency of the spirit in opposition to them; but tell me, are you satisfied with friendship that has none of the outward forms of friendship, or love that has none of the outward forms of love? Are you satisfied of the existence of a sentiment that has no outward mode of expression? Even the old heathen had their pieties; they would not begin a feast without a libation to their divinities, and there was a shrine in every well-regulated house for household gods.”

“The trouble with all these things,” said Bob, “is that they get to be mere forms. I never could see that family worship amounted to much more in most families.”

“The outward expression of all good things is apt to degenerate into mere form,” said I. “The outward expression of social good feeling becomes a mere form; but for that reason must we meet each other like oxen? not say, ‘Good morning,’ or ‘Good evening,’ or ‘I am happy to see you’? Must we never use any of the forms of mutual good-will, except in those moments when we are excited by a real, present emotion? What would become of society? Forms are, so to speak, a daguerrotype of a past good feeling, meant to take and keep the impression of it when it is gone. Our best and most inspired moments are crystallized in them; and even when the spirit that created them is gone, they help to bring it back. Every one must be conscious that the use of the forms of social benevolence, even towards those who are personally unpleasant to us, tends to ameliorate prejudices. We see a man entering our door who is a weary bore, but we use with him those forms of civility which society prescribes, and feel far kinder to him than if we had shut the door in his face, and said, ‘Go along, you tiresome fellow!’ Now why does not this very obvious philosophy apply to better and higher feelings? The forms of religion are as much more necessary than the forms of politeness and social good-will as religion is more important than all other things.”

“Besides,” said my wife, “a form of worship, kept up from year to year in a family,—the assembling of parents and children for a few sacred moments each day, though it may be a form many times, especially in the gay and thoughtless hours of life,—often becomes invested with deep sacredness in times of trouble, or in those crises that rouse our deeper feelings. In sickness, in bereavement, in separation, the daily prayer at home has a sacred and healing power. Then we remember the scattered and wandering ones; and the scattered and wandering think tenderly of that hour when they know they are remembered. I know, when I was a young girl, I was often thoughtless and careless about family-prayers; but now that my father and mother are gone forever, there is nothing I recall more often. I remember the great old Family Bible, the hymn-book, the chair where father used to sit. I see him as he looked bending over that Bible more than in any other way; and expressions and sentences in his prayers which fell unheeded on my ears in those days have often come back to me like comforting angels. We are not aware of the influence things are having on us till we have left them far behind in years. When we have summered and wintered them, and look back on them from changed times and other days, we find that they were making their mark upon us, though we knew it not.”

“I have often admired,” said I, “the stateliness and regularity of family worship in good old families in England,—the servants, guests, and children all assembled,—the reading of the Scriptures and the daily prayers by the master or mistress of the family, ending with the united repetition of the Lord’s Prayer by all.”

“No such assemblage is possible in our country,” said Bob. “Our servants are for the most part Roman Catholics, and forbidden by their religion to join with us in acts of worship.”

“The greater the pity,” said I. “It is a pity that all Christians who can conscientiously repeat the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer together should for any reason be forbidden to do so. It would do more to harmonize our families, and promote good feeling between masters and servants, to meet once a day on the religious ground common to both, than many sermons on reciprocal duties.”

“But while the case is so,” said Marianne, “we can’t help it. Our servants cannot unite with us; our daily prayers are something forbidden to them.”