The history of family religious life, as a microcosm of the national religious life, seems to me to offer a virgin field for research and documentation. I offer these pages as a study of one family, my own.

At the outset I wish to admit a prejudice in favour of continuity, homogeneity and unity in family religious life. It is only through these safeguards—the fruit, by the bye, of singleness of Faith—that we enjoy the blessings of mutual understanding, concord in social relationships and the benefit of a traditional ethical and spiritual culture. Under the group system of religion the nation is committed to a system that makes for misunderstanding and estrangement between group and group, faction in family life, and prejudice and suspicion between individuals. True it is, as says a Kempis: ‘He who seeks to enjoy things alone, forfeits the advantages that are in common.’