In an age when, amongst our peasantry in particular, family prayer is so extensively and mournfully neglected--when the farmer, the manufacturer, the mechanic, not to mention the more elevated orders, have ceased to obey the injunction laid upon all Presbyterian parents in baptism--it is refreshing to look back to the time when the taking of the book, as it was termed, returned as regularly as the rising and the setting of the sun--when the whole household convened together, morning and evening, to worship the God of their fathers. In public worship, as well as in private prayer, there is much of comforting and spiritual support. It is pleasing, as well as useful, to unite voice with voice, and heart with heart; it is consolatory, as well as comforting, to retire from the world to commune with one's heart and be still; but it is not the less delightful and refreshing to unite in family prayer the charities and sympathies of life--to come to the throne of mercy and of pardon in the attitude and capacity of parent and child, brother and sister, husband and wife, master and servant, and to express, in the common confession, petition, and thanksgiving, our united feelings of sinfulness, resignation, and gratitude. Milton paints beautifully the first impressions which death made upon Eve; and sure I am that, though conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity, I remember the time when I was entirely ignorant of death. I had indeed been informed that I had a father; but as to any change which had been effected upon him by death, I was as ignorant as if I had been embowered from my birth amidst the evergreens of paradise. Everything around me appeared to be permanent and undying, almost unchanging. The sun set only to rise again; the moon waned, and then reappeared, reassured in strength and repaired in form; the stars, in their courses, walked steadily and uniformly over my head; the flowers faded and nourished; the birds exchanged silence for song; the domestic animals were all my acquaintances from the dawn of memory. To me, and to those associated with me, similar events happened: we ate, drank, went to sleep, and arose again, with the utmost regularity. I had, indeed, heard of death as of some inconceivable evil; but, in my imagination, its operation had no figure. I had not even seen a dog die; for my father's favourite Gipsy lived for nine years after his death--a cherished and respected pensioner. At last, however, the period arrived when the spell was to be broken for ever--when I was to be let into the secret of the house of corruption, and made acquainted with the change which death induces upon the human countenance.