On Family Worship

“What I desire and entreat of you is, that you proportion honor and acknowledge God in your families, by calling them together every day to hear some part of his word read to them, and to join for a few minutes at least in your confessions, prayers, and praises to him. And is this a cause, that should need to be pleaded at large by a great variety of united motives? Truly the petition seems so reasonable, and a compliance with it from one who has not quite renounced religion might seem so natural, that one would think worship the bare proposing of it must suffice. Yet experience tells, it is much otherwise. Some who maintain a public profession of religion have refused, and will continue to refuse year after year.

“Reflect, seriously reflect on the reasonableness of family religion. Must not your consciences presently tell you, it is fit that persons who receive so many mercies together, should acknowledge them together? Can you in your mind be satisfied that you and your nearest relatives should pay no joint-homage to that God, who hath set you in your family, and who hath given to you, and to the several members of it, so many domestic enjoyments? Can it be right, if you have any sense of these things each of you in your own hearts, that the sense of them should be concealed and smothered there, and that you should never join in your grateful acknowledgements to him?

“Can you imagine it reasonable, that when you have a constant dependence upon him for so many mercies, without the concurrence of which your family would be a scene of misery, you should never present yourselves together in his presence to ask them at his hand? Upon what principles is public worship to be recommended and urged, if not by such as have their proportional weight here?” (Excerpted from Family Worship by Philip Doddridge)