e intricate sum of to-day's living.
Granted, if you will, that we have outgrown what were to us the seemly
garments of that past. Before relegating them to the attic or
ragpicker, would it not be prudent and pleasant to preserve the laces
with which they were trimmed?

CHAPTER XXXIII.

FAMILY RELIGION.

We are living in an age of surprising inventions and marvelous
machinery. As a natural sequence, ours is an age of delegation. The
habit of doing nothing by hand that can be as well done by a machine
begets the desire to seek out new and presumably better methods of
performing every duty appointed to each of us. Fine penmanship is no
longer a necessity for the clerk or business man; skill with her
needle is not demanded of the wife and mother. Our kitchens bristle
with labor-saving implements warranted to reduce the scullion's and
cook's work to a minimum of toil.

An important problem of the day, involving grave results, is founded
upon the fact that, with the countless multiplicity of Teachers' Helps
and Scholars' Friends, International Lesson Papers, Sunday-school
weeklies and quarterlies and the banded leagues of associated youth
whose watchword is "Christ and the Church," the children and young
people of to-day are, as a rule, less familiar with the text of Holy
Writ, with Bible history and the cardinal doctrines which the
Protestant Church holds are founded upon God's revealed Word than were
the children and youth of fifty years ago. Let me say here that I am
personally responsible for this statement and what is to follow it.
Having been a Bible-class teacher and an active worker in religious
and charitable societies for forty years, and numbering as I do
between twenty-five and thirty clergymen among my near kinsmen, I do
not speak idly or ignorantly upon this subject. My appeal for
corroboration of my testimony is to my contemporaries and co-workers.

The superficiality and glitter that are the bane of modern methods of
education in our country have not spared sanctuary ordinances and
family religion. "The church which is in thy house" is an empty form
of speech when applied to a majority of so-called Christian homes.
Early trains and late dinners, succeeded by evening engagements, have
crowded out family prayers, and the pious custom, honored in all ages,
of "grace before meat," is in many houses disregarded, except when a
clergyman is at the table. Then the deferential bend of the host's
head in