A FAMILY PRAYER BOOK, AND PRIVATE MANUAL: ΤΟ WHICH ARE ADDED FORMS FOR RELIGIOUS SOCIETIES AND SCHOOLS. WITH A COLLECTION OF HYMNS. BY CHARLES BROOKS, FIRST STEREOTYPE EDITION. BOSTON: B. H. GREENE;-HILLIARD, GRAY & Co. (1078) Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1832, by CHARLES BROOKS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts. STEREOTYPED BY LYMAN THURSTON & CO. BOSTON. 766 8873fa 1833 PREFACE. 'Prayer is the soul's sincere desire Uttered or unexpressed.-' In addition to God's command and our Saviour's example, prayer is recommended by its reasonableness and utility. A christian family should be a christian church. Instruction should make it a school of virtue; and piety a temple of the living God. In such a family, prayer is the very breath of the soul. They will celebrate God's perfections with reverence and joy, acknowledge his mercies with gratitude and love, confess their sins with humility and penitence, offer their supplications with piety and fervor, and intercede for their brethren with sympathy and affection. To meet the wishes and supply the wants of such a family, has been my desire in composing these forms for social worship. I have aimed to make them brief, clear and comprehensive; giving to them all the diversity which was possible in the restricted forms of family devotion. In the prayers for individuals, I have wished to keep before the mind the doctrine of a Providence, the grace of the gospel, and the practical principles of religion as they stand connected with the common varieties of human character and condition; with man's wants and blessings, dangers and hopes. I have endeavored to furnish words in which the deepest feelings of the pure and the contrite spirit may find a grateful utterance. Every thing here depends on cultivating a taste for devotion, without which prayer becomes a lifeless, ineffectual form. In preparing this I have proceeded upon the principles adopted in the several previous editions. Of new matter, one hundred pages have been added; and the rest has been so remodelled that the book may be considered a new one. It should be judged of as a whole. To write a few prayers of striking excellence is comparatively easy. The peculiar difficulty of this species of com position is felt when three hundred pages are to be furnished, and all of them are required to be different in expression, just in sentiment, fervent in manner and evangelical in spirit. The readers of other prayer books will find expressions in this which have become common property by their unusual appropriateness. I did not think it worth while, for the sake of being wholly original, to exclude these most impressive forms. The Scriptures teach us to pray with the understanding as well as with the spirit. I have endeavored therefore occasionally to suggest trains of religious thought, hoping thereby to touch the springs of devotion; yet, have carefully avoided those warlike disputes about doctrine, which so often rend in twain the seamless robe of Christ. It has been my first and ruling desire to write such prayers as the Saviour would approve. I have been anxious to take his own as my model, wishing to breathe into these forms the life-giving spirit of his gospel; so that the humble and pious worshipper may sanctify the Lord God in his heart, excite his devotional feelings, and, at the same time, cherish those christian truths and holy hopes which are of the highest value to man. I would now dedicate this manual to those for whom it was written; the old, the middle-aged and the young; the rich and the poor; the learned and the ignorant; the widow and the fatherless; the happy and the disconsolate; hoping that it may be, under Providence, the means of fixing the wandering thoughts of mortal man upon immortal objects, of cherishing in the pious mind the love of christian virtue, and of drawing from God's holy heavens the gift of strength, charity, and submission. Hingham, April 16, 1833. C. B. |