This relation is vital and necessary,--a relation of mutual dependence. The
family is a preparation for the church, subordinate to it, and must,
therefore, throw its influence in its favor, be moulded by it, and labor
With direct reference to the church in the way of training up for
membership in it. As the civil and political relations of home involve the
duty of parents to train up their children for efficient citizenship in the
state, so its moral and religious relations involve the duty of education
for the church. Hence the Christian home is churchly in its spirit,
religion, education, influence, and mission.

Family religion is an element of home, not only as a mere fact or principle
in its subjective form, but in the form and force of the church. In its
unchurchly form it is powerless. It must be experienced and administered in
a churchly spirit and way, not as something detached from the organic
embodiment of Christianity. The relation of the church to the family
forbids this. The church pervades all the forms of society. It includes the
home and the state. It gives to each proper vitality, legitimate
principles, proper direction, and a true destiny.

But home is not only a preparation for the church, but completes itself in
the church,--never out of the church. By the "mystery" of marriage and the
sacrament of holy baptism, home and the church are bound up into each other
by indissoluble bonds. The one receives the mark and superscription of the
other; the one is the type or emblem of the other.

The church, through her ordinances, ministry and means of grace, is brought
directly "into the house," and operates there constantly as a spiritual
leaven. It is the purpose of God that our homes be entrenched within the
sacred enclosures of His church. The former, in its relation to the latter,
is like "a wheel within a wheel,"--one of the parts which make up the great