E-text prepared by Larry B. Harrison, Julia Neufeld, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by the Google Books Library Project (http://books.google.com)
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Copyright, 1907, By Little, Brown, and Company.
Printers S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U. S. A.
The compiler desires to make her grateful acknowledgments to the publishers and authors who have so generously given their permission to use selections from their copyrighted publications. She is especially indebted to Dodd, Mead & Co., Houghton, Mifflin & Co., The Century Co., The Outlook Co., Small, Maynard & Co., McClure, Phillips & Co., for extracts from "The Simple Life" by Charles Wagner and from "The Angelus" by Edwin Markham; G. P. Putnam's Sons for selections from "Christus Victor" by Henry Nehemiah Dodge; to Doubleday, Page & Co. for extracts from "The Story of My Life" by Helen Keller, copyright 1902, 1903; also for selections from "Afterwhiles," copyright 1887, "Riley Farm Rhymes," copyright 1885, "Riley Songs o' Cheer," copyright 1883, "Pipes o' Pan," copyright 1888, used by special permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., to Charles Scribner's Sons for selections from "Fisherman's Luck," "The Lost Word," "Little Rivers," "The Story of the Psalms," "The Toiling of Felix and Other Poems," by Henry Van Dyke, and a selection from "El Dorado" by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Once family devotions were general, now they are rare. There are reasons for the change. One reason is that the simplicity of the old family life is gone. It is not easy to get all the members of the family together at any one time in the day. A part of this is due to less leisure now than formerly. Men must catch trains in the morning. In the evening they are distracted by manifold social engagements.
Yet the need of spiritual adjustment is ever the same. Rapid transit, the telephone, the telegraph, do not take the place of God. Indeed the more rapid pace involved in these modern pace-makers, renders the more necessary some pause in the day for prayer, some upward look, when for a moment the soul may find an open way between itself and God. But how and when? Why not the breakfast table? Surely one or two minutes may be spared. Thirty seconds of silence, then the reading of a noble sentiment from some one who has been thinking for us,--another pause,--and a few words of prayer, framed by some one with more leisure than we have, but who puts us in the mood of prayer and so starts us right upon the duties of the day,--this will bring the needed readjustment.