Religious Education in the Family

by Henry Frederick Cope

§ 2. WHY FAMILY WORSHIP?

Parents need to see the values in family worship. We have been insisting on the primary importance of the religious interpretation of the family as an institution, on the power of the religious motive, and the atmosphere of religion. But wherever there is a truly religious motive and a permanent religious atmosphere these will find definite expression in acts easily recognized as religious. Love is the motive and atmosphere of the true home, but love blossoms into words and bears fruit in a thousand deeds. The life of love dies without reality in act. Ideals are precipitated in expressive acts. So is it with religion in the home; it must not only be real in its sincerity, it must be realized, must pass over into conduct and action, as suggested above in chaps. vii and viii. And it must do this in ways so sharply defined and readily recognized as to leave no doubt as to their meaning. True, all acts may be religious and thus full of worship—this is most important of all—but worship expressly unites all such acts in a spirit of loyalty and aspiration.

Worship is a necessity for the sake of the ideal unity of the family life. Just as the individual must not only feel the religious emotion but must also do the thing called for, so must this united personality of the family give expression to its faith and aspiration, its motives and emotions, in such a manner that, acting as a social unit, all can together put the inner life into the outer form. The social value of family worship is the strongest reason for its maintenance. It is the united act of the family group, the one in which group consciousness is expressly directed to the highest possible aims. Every period of worship brings the family into unity at an ideal level.

The expression of religion in definite forms is necessary for children, too, as furnishing a means by which they can manifest their feeling of the higher meaning of family life. The reality of that feeling is stimulated in the daily, common life of the right family; the hour of worship is one out of many definite forms of its concrete expression. It is the form which gathers up the totality of feeling and aspiration into an act of worship and praise toward God, the Father of all families. It is evident there cannot be true worship in the family that is irreligious in its essential qualities, in its character, in its ideals and atmosphere.

§ 3. ADVANTAGES

The period of worship is a necessity in interpreting to all the spirit and meaning of a religious family. It objectifies the inner life. It makes definite, tangible, and easily remembered the general impressions of religion. It precipitates the atmosphere of religion into definiteness. In the chemical laboratory of a university there is usually a decided atmosphere of chemistry, but no one expects to become a chemical engineer by absorbing that atmosphere, nor even to attain a simple working knowledge by merely general impressions. Definiteness aids in gathering up our knowledge, our impressions.

The reading of the Bible in the home will give, when the passages are wisely chosen, forms of language into which the often chaotic but nevertheless valuable and potential emotions of youth fall as into a beautiful mold; they become remembered forms of beauty thereafter.

Family worship furnishes opportunity for direct religious instruction. When the home life has its regular institution, as regular as meals and play, the formality, the apparent abnormality of conversation about religion, is absent. Children expect and look forward to the period when the family will lay other things aside to think on the eternal values. Their questions in the breathing-space that always ought to follow worship become perfectly natural and sincere.

Family worship lifts the whole level of family life. Ideally conceived, it simply means the family unity consciously coming into its highest place. Children may not understand all the reading nor enter into the motives for all parts of the petition, but they do feel that this moment is the one in which the family enters a holy place. They feel that God is real and that their family life is a part of his whole care and of his life. One short period of natural reverence sends light and calm all through the day. Where the home is the place where true prayer is offered, the family is the group which meets in an act of worship; here and into this group there cannot easily 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.