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Friendly counsels for freedmen

Chapter 14: EVENING PRAYER.
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About This Book

A minister offers practical and moral guidance to recently emancipated people, welcoming their freedom while warning that liberty brings new responsibilities. He encourages gratitude and industry, urging recipients to seek honest labor even at low pay, accept temporary government aid but aim for self-reliance, and use savings to guard against future need. The pamphlet stresses personal habits—cleanliness, economy, sobriety—and insistence on honesty, truthfulness, and avoidance of stealing, lying, and profane swearing. Moral instruction is grounded in Scripture and framed to help families secure stable, respectable livelihoods.

EVENING PRAYER.

O Lord, we give thee thanks that thou hast preserved us through the past day; that thou hast helped us to do our work, and hast not suffered us to fall into any hurtful evils. Yet, Lord, we know and feel that the day has not been without its temptations and sins. We have done many things which we ought not to have done, and have left undone many things which we ought to have done; and for these sins, O Lord, we ask thy forgiveness. Oh, wash them all away in the blood of Jesus. Give us hearts to love and obey thee more perfectly hereafter.

Keep us, O Lord, through the night, from all harm. Give us peaceful sleep. And when the night of death shall come, may we sleep in Jesus, and awake in heaven. This we ask through Jesus Christ, our blessed Redeemer. Amen.

Learn also the Lord’s prayer, and help your children to learn it. You should often say it as a morning prayer; going down upon your knees with your little ones, and all repeating it aloud together.