The Anderson intelligencer. [volume] (Anderson Court House, S.C.) 1860-1914, 1885-11-19
FAMILY RELIGION,
A Sermon Preached by Rev. ID. E. Frler-
son, D. D., in tho Anderson Presbyterian
Church, on Sunday, October, II 1885.


Church, on Sunday, October, II 1885.
A subject such as this is, of primary
and profound importance, universally
conceded, essential to any proper con-
ception of religious duty, is not voiced
by one single declaration of the Sacred
Scriptures; but by the whole drift of
their teaching, by the necessary impli-
cations of all its precepts, BY the very
necessities of gospel propagation and by
its occupancy Of the fifth one of the
great ten words of the decalogue, where
it absolutely covers the whole field of
the relations of man to man, whether as
superiors, interiors or equals. With a
profound and solemn conviction of its
immediate and constant urgency, for
every interest of the Church and society,
and as holding within itself the only safe
and reliable and natural cure for a de-
clining orthodoxy, for vagaries of popu-
lar belief in morals and religion, for
skepticisms overt and incipient, for bold
in6delity, for that bold temerity Of the
age which ventures to question the most
venerable institutions and the most
sacred doctrines: as the prime agency
which must prepare the rising genera
ton for that inevitable but fearful con-
hict of opinion upon which they must
soon enter; a conflict which, from all
present indications, must be more intense,
more radical and more fearful in its con.
sequences upon the Church and upon the
State than any which have preceded it:
as the agency which is to erect mum.
ton of rocks against that most menacing
question which threatens ere long to
come down upon us-the question Of
divorce: as tho true, the final hope Of
the world against the frightful ravages
of spirituous intemperance, constantly
widening and extending its march over
the earth, and as the true, the proper
centre of power which must effectually
resist the tide of Sunday desecration and
rescue our holy time from the hands of
the enemy; with a solemn conviction
that family religion is Gods prime agen-
cy against all these fearful evils, wish
with equal solemnity to call your atten-
ton to it.
Some man will doubtless say: Surely
family religion cannot be subject of
such wide.reaching grasp as to engross
the whole field of religious and social
duty, and to hold power which can
arrest all the evils of our social existence.
But I answer: Give me religious homes
all over this land, and you will have
given me the life.giving tonic which will
send healthful moral circulation
through all our population; the power
that will unlock our prison doors, that
will sweep the docket of our criminal
Courts of their unsightly and disgraceful
crimes; because you will soon have
reared a population too proud, too hon
orable and too pure to patronize drink.
ing saloon; too much animated with the
fear of God and the love of God imbibed
at the sacred altar of the family to pat.
ronize by their presence military drill,
musical entertainment, a boat.race or
excursion on the Sabbath. Give me
family religion in the home, the holy
centre of human society, and you will
have set in operation a power there
which will ramify through it and reach
to its very circumference erecting before
you race of young men who will de-
mand purer circulating literature; a
population that will cease to furnish col.
umns of moral tragedy and of virtue in
ruins to our journals, and cease to fur
nish the taste that revels in them; who
will demand that our theatres be cleansed
of their meretricious and indelicate spec
tacles or go to ruins for the want of pat
ronage: race of young women who
will know how to bring the power of
their sex to bear upon the unbecoming
familiarities of the ball room by an abso-
lutte refusal to honor them with their
presence. Yes, look to the prevalence
of religious homes for the correction of
extravagant and gaudy dressing, for sim.
plicity of Sunday apparel, for an arrest
upon the remorseless dissipation of the
age, for the publication Of the theatre,
for the rescue of the simple dance from
its meretricious complications, for the
closing of drinking shops and the arrest
of an iusatiate in,emperance, for quiet
Sundays, for honest business, for an in
dustrious and economising people, for
instructive journals and pure books. I
look to ssligious homes to foster such an
appetite for truth, knowledge, virtue as
will repudiate the novel that introduces
you into mean company and into secret
chambers and surreptitious exigencies
that demand a forced toll from virtue:
that rejects at sight the book that with
all the garish splendor of the pictorial
art addresses your littleness rather than
your manliness. Yes, l look to pious
homes for the training OF the human soul
from earliest years up to a noble man
hood in all that digni6es our race and in
all that constitutes a noble Christianity,
and l hold most strenuously that this
sacred and primitive institution must do
it's work early and we'll to save the world
from all its disorders and to save the
souls of men from eternal perdition.
For if the hearts of the fathers are not
turned to their children, and the hearts
of the children to their fathers, God will
come and smite the earth with curse.
Let me try to urge home upon my
brethren the great duty of family rcli-
gion by the following arguments:
/. The primary and normal law of pro
payating tie Gospelis by pious families.
All home missions are only secondary
expedient and provision to overtake a
lapsed condition of the country arising
from neglected households. The prima.
ry design of the home and the family is,
as Malachi tells, a "godly seed." Its
very design is to train Christians from
earliest infancy up to manhood. The
pious pair are the progenitors of infant
believers, that by birth become the nat
ural and rightful heritors of the parental
faith. The Kingdom Of Heaven is their
property. Their training is meant to
prepare them to make use of 1t, to put
them in possession of it. Their tfaining
is their conversion: their induction. The
conversion of an adult sinner who has
escaped this training by default of pa
rental faithfulucss is provisional grace,
called in Malachi the "residue of the
spirit" 1t is special grace overtaking
the prodigal and lost one. Men are in
Quoted into the Church of God by sudden
and visible conversion only because their
parents failed to induct them during their
nb;ldhood Tho pofnrul and necessary