It is this sort of first-hand, individual study
while she is still a girl which will help her later to turn to the Book
for encouragement, comfort and strength, and lead her to great thoughts
and the attempting of great things because her own soul is inspired.
The majority of teachers, superintendents and leaders interested in
religious instruction today were trained in Christian homes and taught
as little children to pray. Attendance at church services of various
kinds gave to them almost unconsciously a phraseology of prayer and
impressed upon them the place of prayer in the Christian life. So
familiar is the fact of prayer that they forget that the majority of
pupils in the average Sunday-school of today are not familiar with the
words of prayer at family worship, are at best irregular in church
attendance and that many are associated with no society in the church
where there is any training in prayer.
To such young people prayer has nothing to do with life. They say the
Lord's Prayer at school perhaps, formally and hurriedly in the morning,
they hear the prayer from the superintendent's desk on Sunday, or
perchance remember the evening, "Now I lay me down to sleep," which is
said in many homes not Christian, by the little child. But the prayer;
which though only an echo of adult prayers, and only half understood,
calms many a fear in a childish heart, helps to victory over sin many a
struggling ten-year-old reared in a Christian home, is utterly foreign
to the child who has none of these influences and who meets in the
average Sunday-school not cultivation, but the abstract taken for
granted type of instruction.
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