BV 230 .G5 1886 
 
 Gladden, Washington, 1836 
 
 1918. 
 The Lord's prayer 
 

THE LORD'S PRAYER _____ 
 
 OCT ^^n 1936 
 
 SEVEN HOMILIES ^^ 
 
 Sr .u--.^ 
 
 By WASHINGTON GLADDEN 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 iSS6 
 
Copyright, 1880, 
 By TTASHINGTON GLADDE5 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge. 
 Stereotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & C« 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 Preface ^ 
 
 I. The Eternal Father 9 
 
 II. The Sacred Name 34 
 
 III. The Eternal Kingdom .... 59 
 
 IV. The Blessed Will 82 
 
 V. The Convenient Food 106 
 
 VI. The Forgiving Grace 129 
 
 Vn. The Great Salvation .... 167 
 
PEEFAOE. 
 
 Tele provocation of these homilies was a 
 series of short but incisive letters, written 
 by Mr. John Ruskin to an English clergy- 
 man, but published by the writer's consent 
 in the " Contemporary Review," and meant 
 for all the English clergy. I quote some of 
 his questions. 
 
 " Can this Gospel of Christ be put into 
 such plain words and short terms that a 
 plain man can understand it ? and if so, 
 would it not be, in a quite primal sense, de- 
 sirable that it should be so ? " 
 
 And again : — 
 
 " I want only to put this sterner question 
 to your council, how this Gospel is to be 
 preached ' everywhere ' or ' to all nations,' 
 if first its preachers have not determined 
 quite clearly what it is. And might not 
 
6 PREFACE. 
 
 such definition, acceptable to the entire body 
 of the Church of Christ, be arrived at by 
 merely explaining in their completeness and 
 life the terms of the Lord's Prayer — the 
 first words taught to children all over the 
 Christian world ? " 
 
 And again : — 
 
 " My meaning in saying that the Lord's 
 Prayer might be made a foundation of Gos- 
 pel-teaching was not that it contained all 
 that Christian ministers have to teach ; but 
 that it contains what all Christians are 
 agreed upon as first to be taught ; and that 
 no good parish-working pastor in any part 
 of the world but would be glad to take his 
 part in making it clear and living to his 
 congregation." 
 
 Though I am not a member of the com- 
 munion for which these letters of Mr. Ruskin 
 were intended, I could not help feeling the 
 force of his suggestions, and this small vol- 
 ume is one fruit of them. Whatever value 
 the reader may discover in these studies, the 
 writer has gained by means of them not 
 
PREFACE. 7 
 
 only a better understanding of the Lord's 
 Prayer, but an altogether new sense of the 
 wideness of its range and the fullness of 
 its meaning. 
 NoBTH Chukch Study, Springfield, Mass. 
 
THE LOED'S PEATEK. 
 
 THE ETERNAL FATHER. 
 Our Father who art in heaven. — Matt. vi. 9. 
 
 It is an old path to whose entrance we 
 turn our faces when we begin to study the 
 Lord's Prayer, — an old path and well-worn 
 by the feet of many incurious worshipers 
 and many devout interpreters. What then ? 
 Are there no ways worth walking in but 
 those uncertain trails blazed for us by pio- 
 neers through tangled forests on the fron- 
 tiers of faith ? Old roads there are that 
 offer fair prospects and that lead to pleas- 
 ant places ; where the hedgerows every 
 year are sweet with blossoms and musical 
 with birds ; from beneath whose sheltering 
 rocks the living water springs as cool and 
 
10 TEE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 fresh to-day as when our fathers drank 
 thereof. 
 
 The prayer that Christ taught his dis- 
 ciples is not a threadbare formula; it is 
 as full as it ever was of fresh and vital 
 truth. And while we dwell upon its famil- 
 iar phrases, let us trust that his own Spirit, 
 which takes of the things that he has left 
 and makes them plain to us, will abide 
 with us, helping us now to understand, and 
 evermore devoutly and trustfully to use, the 
 petitions that are grouped in this simple 
 form of words. 
 
 The first thing to be noted is the brevity 
 of this prayer. This is especially significant 
 when taken in connection with the words 
 which the Saviour had just been speaking. 
 " When ye pray use not vain repetitions as 
 the heathen do, for they think that they 
 shall be heard for their much speaking. 
 Be ye not therefore like unto them." In 
 most of the other religions the eflBcacy of 
 prayer has been supposed to depend on its 
 
THE ETERNAL FATHER. 11 
 
 length. The notion is that the gods will 
 do nothing for men unless they are teased. 
 And even the Jews themselves had fallen 
 into this error, for our Lord denounces the 
 Pharisees who devour widows' houses, and 
 for a pretense (or for a mask of their wick- 
 edness) make long prayers. We know 
 that long prayers are quite the fashion now 
 among devout Jews ; one of the maxims of 
 the Rabbis is, " Prolix prayer protracts life." 
 At the sacrament of circumcision the pre- 
 scribed prayers of orthodox Jews are re- 
 peated with great rapidity, for the reason 
 that if they were deliberately read a whole 
 day would be consumed in reading them. 
 
 It was not the Gentiles alone, then, but 
 his own people as well, that Jesus was re- 
 buking by his warning against vain repe- 
 titions and long prayers. This prayer that 
 he has left us is so short that one who ut- 
 ters it very slowly will finish it within one 
 minute. And while many times we cannot 
 tell our. Father in heaven within the space 
 of one minute all the things that we want 
 
12 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 to tell him, — while we cannot always re- 
 lieve our own burdened spirits without a 
 longer season of communion with him than 
 that, — yet it is true beyond a doubt that 
 we often err as the Jews and the Gentiles 
 did in supposing that we are heard for our 
 much speaking. No doubt many of our 
 public prayers, especially in pulpit and 
 prayer-meeting, would be far more effect- 
 ual if they followed more nearly the pat- 
 tern set for us in the brevity of the Lord's 
 Prayer. 
 
 Two or three more questions ought to 
 be answered before we proceed witli our 
 study. 
 
 How was this prayer to be used ? Was 
 it to be used exclusively ? So some per- 
 sons have supposed. In Luke's version of 
 the prayer he reports the Master as prefac- 
 ing it with the words, " When ye pray, 
 say, Our Father who art in heaven," 
 etc. Therefore it has been inferred that 
 he meaut to give them a form of words 
 
THE ETERNAL FATHER. 13 
 
 which they were always to use, and that 
 they were never to use any other words of 
 prayer. But it is plain that this cannot be 
 his meaning, because we have a record in 
 the Acts of the Apostles of several prayers 
 which did not follow this form of words, 
 and which were answered abundantly. To 
 confine his disciples to a single form of 
 prayer would have been exactly contrary 
 to the whole spirit of his teaching. 
 
 But if we are at liberty to use other 
 words when we pray, ought we always 
 when we pray to use these words — to in- 
 clude this prayer in all our supplications ? 
 No ; I do not think that our Lord means to 
 require that. We shall often wish to pray 
 in these words ; but he means that our de- 
 sires shall be free to utter themselves in 
 their own way. In Matthew's report of 
 the prayer, our Lord begins by saying : 
 '•'' After this manner^ therefore, pray ye." 
 The prayer is a model, in its simplicity, its 
 brevity, its directness ; but it is not a pre- 
 scribed form ; it is a staff and not a fetter 
 for the praying soul. 
 
14 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 Was it the design of the Master that this 
 prayer, or indeed that any prayer, should 
 be used publicly? Some things that are 
 said in this Sermon on the Mount would 
 seem to answer this question in the nega- 
 tiv^. " When thou prayest thou shalt not 
 be as the hypocrites are ; for they love to 
 pray standing in the synagogues and in the 
 corners of the streets, that they may be 
 seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they 
 have their -reward. But thou, when thou 
 prayest, enter into thy closet, and when 
 thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father 
 which is in secret ; and thy Father which 
 seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." 
 Does this forbid all public prayer? Cer- 
 tainly it does if we are always to take the 
 Bible just as it reads — to interpret all its 
 sayings literally. No command could be 
 more express than this of our Lord, not to 
 pray in the synagogues, but when we pray 
 to enter into the closet and shut the door. 
 Yet we know that our Lord himself some- 
 times prayed in the presence of others. He 
 
THE ETERNAL FATHER. 15 
 
 prayed at the tomb of Lazarus ; he prayed 
 in the upper room with his disciples on the 
 night of the Last Supper — that prayer of 
 triumphant faith and deathless love which 
 John has recorded in tHe seventeenth chap- 
 ter of his Gospel. We know, too, that the 
 prayers of his disciples, when they were 
 all with one accord in one place, and there 
 lifted up their supplications, were richly 
 answered. So, then, we infer that this 
 preface of the Lord's Prayer is not to be 
 taken literally; that it is only a strong re- 
 buke of ostentatious praying, — of the hy- 
 pocrisy which prays to be heard and seen 
 of men. Indeed, all true prayer in public 
 is a kind of secret prayer ; for, though the 
 one who prays stands or kneels among his 
 fellow-men, he is as much alone with God 
 as if he were in his closet. He may think 
 of those who listen ; he may seek to put 
 himself in their places and to be the voice 
 of their desires and their confessions; but 
 the moment he begins to think of what 
 they are thinking about his prayer, that 
 
16 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 moment he ceases to pray. Prayer in the 
 
 assembly, as well as in the solitude, is " the 
 flight of one alone to the only One." 
 
 Let us turn now to the first sentence of 
 the Lord's Prayer, which shall be our theme 
 for a little while this morning. 
 
 Our Father who art in heaven. Did the 
 people to whom this Sermon on the Mount 
 was spoken know before this that God was 
 their Father ? It is confessed that they had 
 clearer ideas about God than any other peo- 
 ple in the world; was this thought that he 
 is our Father among their common thoughts 
 of him ? 
 
 No, it was not. I believe that the word 
 Father is applied to God seven times in the 
 Old Testament ; among the innumerable 
 references to the Supreme Being which 
 crowd almost every chapter of all the books 
 of the Old Testament but one, he is men- 
 tioned just seven times as a Father, — five 
 times as the Father of the Hebrew people, 
 twice as sustaining that relation to indi- 
 
THE ETERNAL FATHER. 17 
 
 viduals. Of these two intimations that God 
 is the Father of individual men, one is a 
 promise to David that God will be a father 
 to his son, Solomon ; the other is a predic- 
 tion that by and by men will pray to God 
 calling him Father, — a prediction fulfilled 
 in this prayer. For there is no record of 
 any prayer in the Old Testament in which 
 God is addressed as Father. We have the 
 words of several prayers in which the holy 
 men of God called upon him by the names 
 that they best knew him by, but there is 
 not one in which they address him as their 
 Father. " In the vocative case, as an ad- 
 dress to God in prayer," says Dean Mansel, 
 the name of Father " does not occur in the 
 Old Testament." 
 
 It was, then, practically a new thought 
 about God which our Saviour gave his dis- 
 ciples when he taught them about God. 
 They had always known him as the Eter- 
 nal, the Creator, the Self-existent One, the 
 Supreme Ruler, the Judge, the Lord of 
 Hosts or of Battles, the Captain of the 
 
18 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 armies of heaven ; but this thought of him 
 as the Father in heaven was one that was 
 very far from all their common thoughts of 
 him. When a prayer was given them in 
 which this name, and this name only, was 
 applied to him, — when they were taught 
 to think of him as their Father, and to 
 come to him with the freedom and the con- 
 fidence that a little child feels in coming to 
 its father, it is certain that a wonderful 
 change must have taken place in all their 
 religious ideas and feelings. This word took 
 them into a new world. I do not think that 
 any of us can begin to imagine the revolu- 
 tion that was made in the religious life of 
 the disciples of Christ when they began to 
 say, " Our Father in Heaven," and began, 
 though dimly, to understand that in all its 
 tender and winning suggestions the word 
 was not only true, but that it was far within 
 the truth. It was to them as if they had 
 been standing for a long time before the 
 grim outer walls of some old castle which 
 they had been summoned to enter, — stand- 
 
THE ETERNAL FATHER. 19 
 
 ing there and looking doubtfully at the for- 
 bidding granite battlements, witli cannon 
 and sentries on the ramparts, with sugges- 
 tions of gloomy passages and dungeons and 
 chains within, — when all at once a little 
 door opened, and they saw within the wall 
 a pleasant garden, with flowers and fount- 
 ains and cool retreats, and caught a breath 
 of the sweetest odors, and heard a burst of 
 melody from singing birds and happy chil- 
 dren playing in the sun. Such an opening 
 into the very heart of God did this word 
 Father make for all who had stood for long 
 in the cold shadow of the old monarchical 
 conception of his character. There was 
 meaning: in the word of the Master when 
 he said, " I am the Door." 
 
 One thing, however, these disciples did 
 not need to learn about God, and that was 
 his personality. If they had not known that 
 God was a Person, this word would have 
 taught it to them ; but they did know it. 
 Whatever else their special training had 
 failed to do for the Jews, it had not failed 
 
20 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 to convey to them the truth that God is a 
 conscious Person ; that he has intelligence 
 in some respects like ours, yet infinitely 
 transcending ours ; that he has affection, 
 and free will, so that he can love his chil- 
 dren and choose their welfare. Mr. Mat- 
 thew Arnold tries to make out that the ear- 
 lier Hebrews did not believe in a personal 
 Deity (which is a monstrous inversion of 
 the facts of the Biblical history), but even 
 he asserts that in the later days of the na- 
 tion this belief was universal among them. 
 
 The word Father did not help them in 
 forming the idea of the Divine Personality ; 
 they had believed God to be a Person ; only 
 it was, as we have said, a different kind of 
 person that they had thought of when they 
 had thought of him, — it was a King, or a 
 Judge, or a Warrior, and not a loving 
 Father. 
 
 To us, however, this word may be pre- 
 cious, not so much in giving us the idea of 
 the personality of God, as in helping us to 
 hold on to it. For although this doctrine 
 
THE ETERNAL FATHER. 21 
 
 may be abused, and often is ; though men 
 who speak of God as a Person often mean 
 by that that he is altogether such an one 
 as themselves, thus degrading his charac- 
 ter and limiting his power ; nevertheless it 
 is essential to all true worship and to all 
 fruitful religious thought that we keep hold 
 of this idea, — that he is something more 
 than a law or a system of laws, something 
 better than a force or a universe of forces, 
 something diviner than the order of nature 
 or "the stream of tendency by which all 
 things fulfill the laws of their being," — 
 that he is a conscious Person, a living, lov- 
 ing Father. 
 
 Just at this time there is special need 
 of reaffirming this truth. For the study of 
 physical science, which is simply a study 
 of the laws of physical nature, has come to 
 occupy so large a place in the interest of 
 men that many of them have been inclined 
 to insist upon the hasty and foolish conclu- 
 sion that there is no God but nature and 
 its forces ; that the All is God, and that 
 
22 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 there is no other. This is Pantheism — 
 and there are many forms of it. Some 
 Pantheists seem to think that God is sim- 
 ply the sura of all things that are ; others 
 teach, with Spinoza, that God is the univer- 
 sal substance — the substance out of which 
 all the worlds and all their works were 
 made; (who made them I wonder?) others 
 that the forces which act and react in nat- 
 ure, — gravitation, cohesion, chemical affin- 
 ity, heat, light, electricity and the rest, — 
 that these are Gpd ; others say, with Fichte, 
 that God is the universal moral order. But 
 all these theories agree in this, that they 
 identify God with the universe ; they strip 
 him of all individuality ; they make of him 
 only an immense aggregation of things or a 
 group of forces or a principle of morality or 
 something else abstract or impersonal. 
 
 I will not stop to show how unphilosoph- 
 ical this notion is, though that is not a hard 
 thing to do ; I only wish to point out that 
 this word, by which our Lord teaches us to 
 pray to his and our Father, is the very 
 
THE ETERNAL FATHER. 23 
 
 antithesis of Pantheism. It aflBrms exactly 
 what Pantheism denies. If God is our 
 Father he is surely a conscious Person. No 
 Pantheist can use the words of the Lord's 
 Prayer in their obvious and natural mean- 
 ing. None of them except Renan, I think, 
 has ever attempted it. He seems to belong 
 to a class of Pantheists whose views are 
 concisely expressed by Eckhart, one of the 
 old mystics : " God is nothing and God is 
 something ; that which is something is also 
 nothing ; what God is he is altogether." I 
 should like to see anybody go to work to 
 disprove that statement. Hegel also ap- 
 pears to take the same view. (He says that ^'^ 
 " pure bemg is pure nothing," which comes -^ 
 near to being pure nonsense.] Renan be- 
 longs to this school, apparently, and in a 
 book which he wrote a good while ago he 
 made use of this expression, " Our Father, 
 the Abyss! " Our Father, the Abyss ! Or- 
 phaned indeed must he be who can find 
 neither in the universe nor above it any 
 Father but an abyss, bottomless, boundless, 
 sightless, thoughtless. 
 
24 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 Now right over against these mystical 
 absurdities, this system which confounds 
 God and nature, is the blessed truth of the 
 text told in this word Father, — one word 
 that is worth as much more than all the 
 scholastic arguments of Pantheism as bread 
 is worth more than stones to a hungry 
 man. 
 
 O you who are tired out with the work 
 and the battle of this laborious life, and 
 are longing for rest and home and love ; 
 you who are saddened by losses and be- 
 reavements here, and are pining for conso- 
 lation and sympathy that men cannot give 
 you ; you who have found that sin is too 
 strong for you, and are crying out for help 
 to overcome it, — are you satisfied when 
 men point you to the forces of nature or the 
 laws of the moral universe, or worse than 
 all, to an abyss of non-existence, and tell 
 you to find there the help that you are look- 
 ing for ? This is all that Pantheism has 
 to offer you. Is it enough ? It is like of- 
 fering to a man who is famishing with 
 
TEE ETERNAL FATHER. 26 
 
 thirst a Report of the Water Commission- 
 ers of some foreign city, printed in an un- 
 known tongue. 
 
 I have only time left to touch in the most 
 hasty and superficial way half a dozen in- 
 ferences from this short phrase, each of 
 which demands a full hour for its adequate 
 consideration. 
 
 And first, the truth contained in this new 
 name of God is the true constructive idea 
 in all theological science. Build all your 
 theologies on this foundation. Hold fast to 
 the idea of uniform law, of a nature of 
 things which God has established, under 
 which sin is punished ; but when you speak 
 of the personal character and government 
 of God, of his direct interference in the 
 affairs of men, of what he does supernat- 
 urally, in the order of history, remember 
 that he is our Father. The theologies of 
 the past have been built mainly upon the 
 monarchical rather than the paternal idea 
 of God. In their religious life., all Chris- 
 
26 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 tians have kept hold of the truth that God 
 is their Father ; in their theological specula- 
 tions they have chosen rather to emphasize 
 the representation that he is a Moral Gov- 
 ernor ; and all their reasonings about his 
 administration have been based upon this 
 idea ; all their statements and inferences of 
 what he can do and cannot do, what he 
 must do and must not do, have been drawn 
 from the analogies of human governments ; 
 from the rules of policy and expediency 
 that human rulers have found it necessary 
 for them to adopt. This is a very unsafe 
 method of reasoning. The highest concep- 
 tion of God that the Bible gives us is the 
 one that should rule in all our theological 
 speculations, and that is the conception 
 which Christ gives us in the word Father. 
 
 The word suggests to us also the dignity 
 of human nature. It is a reaffirmation of 
 that primal truth that we find in the first 
 book of the Bible, that man is made in the 
 image and likeness of God. " Behold what 
 manner of love the Father has bestowed 
 
THE ETEUNAL FATHER. 27 
 
 upon US that we should be called the sons 
 of God." He who was before all worlds, 
 he whose will is the source of all laws, he 
 who is the life of all that live, the Omnipo- 
 tent, the Allwise, the Eternal God, is our 
 Father. 
 
 " Our Father." The word not only lifts 
 up and glorifies every humblest human 
 creature, it binds together in one brother- 
 hood, in one family, all that dwell upon the 
 face of the earth. It is the grand leveler 
 of ranks and hierarchies ; it is the charter 
 of fraternity ; it is the prophecy of peace 
 and good- will among men. When you say 
 " Our Father," whom do you include in 
 that word " our ? " Nay, whom do you 
 dare to exclude ? It sweeps us all in ; it 
 gathers into one waiting company the king 
 and the beggar, the philosopher and the 
 hind, the Hellene and the Hottentot, the 
 saint and the sinner ; it confesses the par- 
 entage and the dignity and the worth of 
 every human soul, and cries, in the simple 
 words of Tiny Tim, " God bless us every 
 
28 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 one." What a prayer this is that reaches 
 up so high and down so low and forth so 
 far ; the breadth and length and depth and 
 height of whose simplest petitions we often 
 so feebly utter ! 
 
 Again, what help and inspiration there 
 is for us in the thought of the relationship 
 here pointed out ! Take it home to your- 
 self, my brother. Try to make out some- 
 thing of what it means when you say that 
 God is your Father. Doubtless it means 
 a great deal. Doubtless there is more of 
 comfort and strength in it than you have 
 ever got out of it. 
 
 Mayhap you are despised and trodden 
 under foot of men, having almost lost your 
 self-respect. Lift yourself up ; let no man 
 despise you ! God is your Father ! You 
 are the heir of his love ; you ought to be 
 a sharer in his glory. 
 
 You may be in poverty and wretched- 
 ness ; hunger is pinching you and toil is 
 wearing you out ; but do not lose heart ; 
 God is your Father ; do not doubt that you 
 
THE ETERNAL FATHER. 29 
 
 fire just as dear to Mm as those are wlio 
 have more of this world's goods than you, 
 and that the time will come when they as 
 well as you will see that it is so. Never 
 give way to repining ; never suffer yourself 
 to fall into that state of shamefacedness and 
 abjectness in which so many of the poor 
 are found ; never accept the world's false 
 estimates of worth. If other men seem to 
 think that because you are poor you are 
 therefore of little account, do not you be- 
 lieve it. Remember that God is your 
 Father. Respect yourself for your Father's 
 sake. 
 
 It may be that you are lamenting the 
 passing of those who were very dear, and 
 that your path lies through a shadow of 
 darkness that can be felt ; forget not in 
 your sorrow that " like as a father pitieth 
 his children so the Lord pitieth them that 
 fear him." He loves you far more ten- 
 derly than you loved those that are gone ; 
 he would not have taken them from you 
 but for wise and good reasons. 
 
30 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 It may be that you have shpped and sunk 
 into the mire of some great wiclvedness ; 
 but though men may have turned their 
 backs on you God has not forsaken you. If 
 there is in your heart the faintest desire to 
 be reclaimed from your iniquities, he knows 
 it and deliglits to see it ; he will not leave 
 you to perish in your degradation, but will 
 lift you up and succor you if you will only 
 let him. 
 
 Whoever you are, whatever your needs 
 and your griefs may be, whatever your sins 
 may have been, this truth, that God is your 
 Father, ought to be to you a truth full of 
 encouragement and inspiration. 
 
 " The new charity," as one of its wisest 
 apostles said in Boston the other day, 
 " seeks to provide every needy family with 
 a friend." If we could only make every 
 needy family — those needy ones that live 
 in the palaces, as well as those that live in 
 the cellars — see that they have one Friend 
 already, could make him known to them, 
 could get them to trust in him, what a 
 
TEE ETERNAL FATHER. 31 
 
 blessed light would shine into many deso- 
 late homes ! 
 
 Here is a young man just setting out in 
 life. He has his own way to make, and he 
 finds that the currents of human selfishness 
 and greed are sometimes hard to stem. He 
 sees that others about him have influential 
 friends who often help them over hard 
 places, and he says to himself sometimes : 
 " I wish I had a friend, some one with ex- 
 perience and influence, to whom I could go 
 now and then ; not that I want material 
 aid, but I would like to know some wise 
 and strong man who would believe in me, 
 and be glad when I went right, and say so ; 
 and give me moral rather than financial 
 backing in my endeavor to do an honorable 
 and successful business." Such a friend a 
 young business man sometimes finds, and 
 Buch a friendship is often invaluable. 
 
 This is only an allegory by which the 
 inner history of every human soul is visibly 
 set forth. Every one who seeks the true 
 riches finds the needs of a friend whose 
 
32 THE LORD'S PBATER. 
 
 counsel he may trust, on whose strength he 
 may lean. You have such a Friend, my 
 brother ; one whose wisdom is infinite and 
 whose resources are unfailing ; one who 
 believes in you, who never loses his hold on 
 any human soul so long as there is a spark 
 of good left in it ; one who is glad when 
 you do well, and wants to do nothing so 
 much as to help you to do better ; one who 
 stoops to lift you up when you fall, and to 
 lead you out of the ways of peril into the 
 ways of safety ; one in whose presence ten 
 thousand mighty angels, who look always 
 on his face and behold its joy, strike their 
 golden harps with sympathetic gladness 
 whenever one sinner forsakes his sin. 
 
 " Our Father in heaven!'''' Where it is 
 I know not ; what it is no man fully knows. 
 But it is where Our Father is. And who- 
 ever is with him is not far from heaven. 
 Something of the melody of its music, 
 something of the fragrance and the beauty 
 of its sweet fields, steal into his heart even 
 while he walks along the dusty ways of this 
 
THE ETERNAL FATHER. 33 
 
 lower world. Do you fancy that there was 
 much difference with Enoch, say, between 
 the before and the after? God took hhn 
 — hoio I do not know ; but though it may 
 be a little less grand, it is no less sweet to 
 walk with God along the humble paths of 
 daily duty than to ride forth with him so 
 royally " on cherub and on cherubim." The 
 track of that chariot I will not try to trace ; 
 I only care to know that if I am changed 
 into his image through faith in him, I shall 
 awake in his likeness and be satisfied. 
 I 
 
11. 
 
 THE SACRED NAME. 
 Hallowed be thj' name. — Matt. vi. 9. 
 
 The fact that great things have small 
 beginnings is as true in morals as it is in 
 biology. The deepest and most universal 
 moral sentiments show traces of a humble 
 origin. The love of moral purit}'^ was nour- 
 ished by habits of physical purity. Clean- 
 liness is next to godliness, — next before it, 
 indeed, in the order of time. The wash- 
 ings and purifications of the Jews were a 
 ritual drill, out of which the sentiment of 
 moral purity was developed. 
 
 Likewise, the great sentiment of rever- 
 ence was planted in a sterile and unfriendly 
 soil, and kept alive by many merely formal 
 observances. To imagine that men in the 
 earliest ages had the same kind of rever- 
 ence for God that good men have in the 
 
THE SACRED NAME. 35 
 
 present day would be a great error. They 
 were afraid of the various manifestations of 
 force that they saw in nature ; but of genu- 
 ine reverence they knew but little. Here 
 and there a religious genius, like Abraham 
 or Melchisedek, gained some insight into 
 divine things ; but the great majority had 
 but a dim apprehension of the real char- 
 acter of God, and could not therefore have 
 felt any true reverence for him. It was 
 possible, however, for these ignorant and 
 unspiritual people to be trained in certain 
 outward observances which would lead them 
 toward reverence. To this end they were 
 instructed to hold the name Jehovah in scru- 
 pulous regard. It was not freely spoken ; 
 even in reading the Scriptures it was passed 
 over in silence ; some other name of God 
 less sacred was substituted for it. After a 
 time the true pronunciation of this name \y 
 was lost by the Jewish people themselves, 
 and it has never been regained. It passed 
 from the lips of the people ; the sound of 
 it was forgotten ; and scholars who have 
 
86 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 studied the documents and the monuments 
 of antiquity are at a loss to determine what 
 the ol-iginal pronunciation was. Probably, 
 however, it was more nearly like Yahveh 
 than like Jehovah. 
 
 The result of what seems to us the super- 
 stitious treatment of a name was, however, 
 the deepening in the hearts of the people of 
 the sentiment of reverence. In having it 
 so firmly impressed upon their minds that 
 the name of God must not be lightly used, 
 they were also made to feel that the Person 
 and character of God ought to be honored. 
 The name stood for the Person. The Per- 
 son they could not see ; but if they were 
 taught to be silent in the presence of his 
 name, they would learn that his being, as 
 well as the word that represented it to 
 them, was holy. 
 
 The third commandment undoubtedly in- 
 cludes this thought, though I doubt if it is 
 the principal thought. It is against per- 
 jury rather than profanity that the com- 
 mandment is chiefly directed. " Thou shalt 
 
THE SACRED NAME. 37 
 
 not swear falsely in the name of the Lord " 
 is the primary meaning. But the wrong- 
 fulness of appealing to God's name lightly 
 and wantonly is also suggested ; and there 
 are many other passages in the Levitical 
 Law where this sin is clearly forbidden and 
 threatened with condign punishment. 
 
 Under this- training there sprung up in 
 the minds of devout Jews a certain rever- 
 ence for the sacred name, which, under 
 more spiritual teaching, should grow into 
 reverence for the divine character. And 
 this teaching our Lord is now supplying. 
 ^"'^ What name is this that He is teaching us 
 to hallow in our prayers ? God had been 
 known thus far by many names. He was 
 first revealed as Elohim, the God of nature, 
 the Creator, — a name to which in the 
 early Scriptures no moral attributes are at- 
 tached. He was known also to the early 
 patriarchs as El-Schaddai — the God Al- 
 mighty. He was known also as the Holy 
 One of Israel, — and as the Lord of Hosts. 
 Above all, He declared himself by that 
 
38 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 name of which we have been speaking, 
 which in our version is rendered Jehovah, 
 — or for which the word Lord in small 
 capitals is substituted, — which seems to 
 mean the Self-existent and Eternal Being. 
 And now Jesus teaches us to address him 
 as our Father. Which of these names are 
 we here bidden to hallow ? 
 
 As soon as we ask this question it at 
 once becomes plain that " name " is not 
 used here in the narrow verbal sense of 
 which we have been speaking, but in a 
 wider and larger sense. It is not merely 
 the letters and syllables that spell the name 
 by which God is known that our Lord 
 teaches us here to sanctify. The petition 
 includes, I suppose, all the names by which 
 God has revealed himself. As the God of 
 Nature, as the Lord Almighty, as the Lord 
 of Sabbaoth, as the Holy One of Israel, as 
 the Eternal and Self-existent One, as the 
 Heavenly Father, in all the characters that 
 he bears, he is to be reverenced and glori- 
 fied. 
 
THE SACRED NAME. 39 
 
 There is no word that is large enough to 
 hold all the truth that God has told men 
 about himself. Pie must needs choose many 
 different words- under which to declare to 
 men different attributes and phases of his 
 own character. And when all these words 
 are uttered the half is not told. 
 
 " Join all the glorious names 
 Of wisdom, love, and power 
 That mortals ever kuM^ 
 That angels ever bore ; 
 All are too mean to speak his worth, 
 Too mean to set his glories forth! " 
 
 And it is not only by words that he has 
 made himself known. In the order and the 
 beauty of the universe he discloses himself; 
 signs of his presence and proofs of his power 
 are shown us in the tilings that he has made 
 that no words could ever have given us. 
 
 "The Lord our God is Lord of all, 
 His station who can find? 
 I hear him in the waterfall, 
 I hear him in the wind. 
 
 "If in the gloom of night I shroud, 
 His face I cannot fly; 
 
40 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 I see him in the evening cloud 
 And in the morning sky." 
 
 And not only in tbe words of the Book 
 and tlie laws and lives of the world does he 
 display himself to discerning minds, but 
 also in the movements of the race ; in the 
 slowly unfolding plans of his loving provi- 
 dence ; in the increasing purpose that runs 
 through the ages. And he who stands with 
 reverent spirit 4n the track of the world's 
 progress, and who knows enough of the past 
 to have any sense of historical perspective, 
 may well cry out : — 
 
 " God, our God, thou shinest here, 
 Thine own this latter day; 
 To us thy radiant steps appear; 
 Here beams thy glorious ray. 
 
 "The fathers had not all of thee; 
 * New births are in thy grace; 
 
 All open to our souls shall be 
 Thy glory's hiding-place. 
 
 "Thou comest near; thou standest by; 
 Our work begins to shine: 
 Thou dweliest with us mightily ; 
 On speed the years divine I " 
 
TEE SACRED NAME. 41 
 
 And not only in the names by which the 
 Bible describes him, and in the forms in 
 which the creation reveals him, and in the 
 events by which history unveils his pres- 
 ence, but also in the person of him who 
 was the brightness of his glory and the ex- 
 press image of his person, who is the Word, 
 that reveals God to men ; who could say of 
 himself, " He that hath seen me hath seen 
 the Father," is God made known to men. 
 
 "Son of the Father! Lord most high! 
 How glad is he who finds thee nigh! 
 Come in thy hidden majesty; 
 Fill us with love, fill us with thee." 
 
 And not only in the written word, and 
 in the created universe, and in the broaden- 
 ing stream of progress, and in the person of 
 his Son, but also in the heart of the hum- 
 ble and contrite believer, does God reveal 
 himself. 
 
 " Oh not in circling depth or height, 
 
 But in the conscious breast, — 
 Present to faith though veiled from sight, 
 
 There doth his spirit rest; 
 Oh come thou Presence infinite 
 
 And make thy creatures blest." 
 
42 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 And these are only parts of the ways in 
 which the Infinite One unveils his glories 
 to the thought of his children. Indeed we 
 may say that the whole of creation, the 
 whole of providence, the whole of history, 
 is simply God's method of revealing him- 
 self. The things that are, the forces that 
 work, the events that take place, are only 
 manifestations of the power and wisdom 
 and love of the infinite God. Because of 
 the perverseness of human wills and the 
 corruption of human natures this manifes- 
 tation is often imperfect ; we see as through 
 a glass, darklj'' ; but the dimness is not in 
 the light that shines, it is in the medium 
 through which it shines ; these refracted 
 and broken rays disclose to us all that we 
 are able to receive of the glory and beauty 
 of the Eternal God our Father. 
 
 Now the name of God includes all by 
 
 ^ which he is or may be known to us. It 
 
 is not only in the sub-vocal consonants of 
 
 the Hebrew tongue that it is spelled ; in 
 
 the shining alphabet of crystals and the 
 
THE SACRED NAME. 48 
 
 rucle forms of fossils the geologist writes it 
 for us ; with pencil of starlight the as- 
 tronomer inscribes it upon the sky ; the 
 flowers are a bright anthology that pre- 
 serve for us part of its secret ; the fall and 
 the rising again of empires and dynasties 
 are the solemn articulations by which its 
 majesty is syllabled; the character of the 
 Son of Man is a perfect utterance of it in 
 the language of the human life, and the 
 Comforter who comes in his name trans- 
 lates that for us into the terms of every- 
 day experience. 
 
 Now as I understand this first petition it 
 includes the thought that all these distinct 
 but conspiring revelations of God are to be 
 reverenced. Whatever helps us to a fuller 
 knowledge of him — his nature, his charac- 
 ter, his purposes, his works — ought to be 
 held sacred. All these forms of truth, all 
 these methods of disclosure by which he is 
 seeking to make himself known, should be 
 reverently treated. It is not only that part 
 of his name which is given to us in the 
 
44 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 Bible, but every other part of his name 
 that we have learned, or that he has sought 
 to communicate to us, that we ought to hal- 
 low. And the men who contemn or even 
 ignore the truths of science or the facts of 
 history or the witness of the Christian con- 
 sciousness cannot offer this prayer without 
 judging themselves. 
 
 " Whoever is afraid of science," says the 
 Rev. Newman Smyth, " does not believe in 
 God. Though the truths which the sev- 
 eral sciences have discovered in the various 
 fields of inquiry are with difficulty brought 
 together and harmonized ; though the facts 
 of nature, history, and consciousness lie 
 before our. reason, often uncovered and 
 broken, like those fragments of Assyrian 
 records which have been thrown together 
 in the British Museum ; we should, never- 
 theless, regard every one of them as of 
 value, and as having its own place and 
 worth in the record of God's creative pur- 
 pose, which, some day, we may hope not 
 merely to decipher in syllables and to 
 
THE SACRED NAME. 45 
 
 know in part, but to comprehend in its 
 length and its breadth, and to read as one 
 grand connected story." ^ 
 
 But the name of God stands for God 
 himself, and I suppose that when we intel- 
 ligently offer this prayer we express the 
 desire not only that the various revelations 
 which God has made to men may be rev- 
 erently treated, but that God himself may 
 be honored in our thoughts and in our con- 
 duct. 
 
 To hallow is either to make holy or to 
 consider and recognize as holy. We can- 
 not by our words nor by our deeds add any 
 essential holiness to the Holy One of Israel ; 
 but we can think holy thoughts about him; 
 we can sanctify him in our hearts. 
 
 We all believe that there is only one 
 God in heaven ; but there is another sense 
 in which it is true that every man wor- 
 ships a God of his own, unlike the God in 
 heaven, unlike the deities worshiped by 
 his fellows. For no man's conception of 
 
 1 Old Faiths in New Light, p. 24. 
 
46 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 God is perfect ; and the character -which 
 each man ascribes to God is bhirred by his 
 own ignorance and distorted by his own 
 imagination. There is only one President 
 Hayes in Washington ; but the President 
 Hayes whom you think of when I speak 
 his name may be a very different man from 
 the one I think of, and both may be very 
 different from the reality. If each one of 
 the citizens of the United States could give 
 an accurate mental photograph of the Pres- 
 ident, as he conceives his character, we 
 should have a great variety of pictures. 
 
 Now the conceptions of the character of 
 God that men entertain differ far more 
 than their conceptions of the character of 
 their fellow-men, because the range of 
 thought is wider; elements of mystery en- 
 ter in that do not enter into men's esti- 
 mates of their neighbors ; and while every 
 rej)resentation that men can make to them- 
 selves of the Infinite Father must be im- 
 perfect and unworthy of him, yet some are 
 far more imperfect than others. And in 
 
THE SACRED NAME. 47 
 
 this petition we are taught to ask that onr 
 thoughts of God may be freed from error 
 and cleansed from corruption ; that our con- 
 ception of his character may be corrected 
 and enlarged and hallowed, so that it shall 
 come nearer to the ineffable divine reality. 
 
 Every man's religion, every man's .char- 
 acter, will greatly depend upon his thought 
 of God. If God is to him a tyrant, the 
 mere incarnation of will, whose justice is 
 the simple impulse to destroy all creatures 
 that transgress his law, then the man's re- 
 ligion must needs be a slavish worship and 
 a groveling fear. If, on the other hand, 
 God is to him a good-natured and weakly 
 indulgent Father, who does not care much 
 whether his children do right or wrong, 
 and who expends the resources of his om- 
 nipotence in preserving them from the de- 
 struction which they court by their mis- 
 deeds, the religion of this man will be apt 
 to be simple recklessness ; he will stifle 
 Paul's indignant scruple, and continue in 
 sin that grace may abound. And whatever 
 
^ 
 
 48 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 defect we ascribe to God in our thought, not 
 only our theologies but our lives are likely 
 to be perverted by it. It is therefore of 
 the very fii'st importance that our thought 
 of God should be a large and pure and 
 worthy thought; that we do not belittle 
 and dishonor him by our imaginations. 
 And by no petition that we can utter can 
 we express a deeper need of our lives than 
 we do by this petition that God may be 
 hallowed in our thoughts. 
 
 But how shall we who are unholy think 
 holy thoughts of God ? Must not the 
 thought be as the thinker ? How can a 
 pure stream issue from an impure source? 
 Is it possible for us, by any energy of our 
 own, to correct the aberrations of our men- 
 tal vision and replace the distorted images 
 of God that fill our minds with those that 
 more perfectly represent him? Certainly 
 not ; and, therefore, this is a prayer for di- 
 vine illumination and cleansing ; for the 
 gift of that Spirit which searcheth all 
 things, yea, the deep things of God, and re- 
 
TEE SACRED NAME. 49 
 
 veals them unto men. It is a prayer that 
 God himself will come to us, and abide in 
 our thoughts, and make himself known to 
 us in all his glorious holiness. 
 
 But the name of the Lord is hallowed, 
 not only by treating with reverence the 
 revelations that he has made of himself, 
 and by thinking pure and worthy thoughts 
 about him, but also by adding, as we can, 
 to the respect and honor in which his name 
 is held among men. God as well as men 
 has a name — that is to say, a reputation 
 — in the earth. He is held by all his chil- 
 dren in a certain estimation. And it is of 
 great consequence that this name that he 
 bears be an honorable and illustrious name ; 
 that what men call his declarative glory be 
 promoted. It is not only important that 
 you and I think worthy thoughts about 
 him, it is important also that we do all we 
 can to increase the honor in which he is 
 held. 
 
 Every dutiful child wishes his father to 
 be honored by all who know him. The tes- 
 
 4 
 
50 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 timonies of others to his father's worth 
 fill liim with thankfulness ; any injury that 
 threatens his father's reputation causes him 
 ipain. And so th e tru e child of God desires 
 that all men should love and revere liis 
 Father in heaven ; that not only the goodly 
 j fellowship of the prophets, and the noble 
 ! army of martyrs, and the glorious company 
 of the apostles, with cherubim and sera- 
 phim should praise him, but that all men 
 everywhere should honor him ; that earth 
 as well as heaven should be filled with the 
 majesty of his glory. So when we pray 
 that his name may be hallowed, this is part 
 of what we pray for, — that not only in our 
 own thoughts but in the thoughts of all men 
 he may be honored ; that not only by our 
 own lips but by the lips of all to whom he 
 has given breath his praises may be sung. 
 That is the wish that finds voice in this 
 petition. Is there anything that we can do 
 toward bringing it to pass ? 
 
 Most of the prayers that we offer we 
 have something to do with answering. Can 
 
THE SACRED NAME. 51 
 
 we help to answer this one ? Assuredly we 
 can, and it is one chief part of our duty 
 as children of the Heavenly Father. The 
 old catechism says that man's chief end 
 is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. 
 And there is much that we can do to show 
 forth the honor of his name, and make 
 his praise glorious. 
 
 1. We cause his name to be hallowed 
 in the earth by telling the truth about 
 him. When, by his indwelling in our own 
 lives, we are enabled to think true and 
 worthy thoughts about him, then we may 
 tell these thoughts to others. The truth 
 about him, when it is known, can only 
 add to the lustre of his name. And one 
 reason why many men do not hallow his 
 name is simply that they do not understand 
 his character. They have been told many 
 things about him that are not true. If 
 the things that they have been told toere 
 true, they could not glorify him in their 
 thoughts, they could not even respect him. . 
 
 Coming out of a place of worship some 
 
62 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 time ago, I met a man in a very angry 
 frame of mind. The preacher had been 
 representing God as acting upon certain 
 principles that are palpably unjust and 
 wrong — as doing things that any civil 
 magistrate would be execrated for doing. 
 " If that is the kind of God that you peo- 
 ple worship," said the angry hearer, " I 
 wish to know notliing more about him." 
 Of course I could do nothing else but tell 
 him that the statements of the preacher, 
 though made in good faith, were incorrect ; 
 that God was never known to act upon the 
 principles imputed to him. But it was 
 certainly a very unfortunate thing that this 
 preacher, who was a good man, should have 
 represented God to his hearers in a way 
 that caused the moral sense of some of the 
 most thoughtful of them to revolt. You 
 are not hallowing the name of God when 
 you make statements about him which give 
 the impression that he is unjust or tyran- 
 nical or cruel. The truth about him will 
 not make such an impression of his char- 
 
THE BACRED NAME. 53 
 
 acter upon any rational creature. Let us 
 be careful, if we wish to promote the honor 
 of his name, to say nothing about him that 
 is not true. 
 
 2. We can cause his name to be hal- 
 lowed, also, by showing men that we honor 
 and love him. Good sentiments as well as 
 bad sentiments are contagious. A sincere 
 and honest reverence for God will commu- 
 nicate itself to other minds. If our neigh- 
 bors see that we do hold his name and 
 character in high regard, they will be in- 
 clined to feel that he is worthy of the honor 
 we give him. 
 
 I saw once in Broadway, from a window 
 where I sat (and the thing has been seen 
 more than once), a cluster of men stand- 
 ing and looking at a certain quarter of the 
 sky for an hour or two. What were they 
 looking at? Nobody seemed to know ex- 
 actly. The general impression was that 
 they were trying to see one of the planets, 
 Jupiter or Mars, which was bright enough 
 to be visible by daylight. Who had gath- 
 
54 THE LORD'S PRAYEfiT 
 
 ered this group ? Nobody. Two men had 
 stopped on the sidewalk and had begun to 
 look steadfastly into the sky. Presently 
 some one joined them, and another and 
 another, all looking in the same direction, 
 some shading their eyes, some rolling their 
 newspapers into telescopic tubes and peer- 
 ing through them. Not many questions 
 would be asked by the members of such a 
 group in New York ; but somebody con- 
 jectured that it was a star that they were 
 looking for, and said so, and that conjecture 
 was passed from one to another, and served 
 as the only organic idea that the assem- 
 blage possessed. The two men whose cu- 
 riosity, whether real or feigned, was the 
 origin of the collection soon passed on ; no- 
 body stayed long, but as one after another 
 walked away with a puzzled or amused 
 expression of countenance, their places 
 would be filled by others who would be 
 drawn into the little circle by the force of 
 what the phrenologists would call imita- 
 tiveness, — by the simple disposition to do 
 
THE SACRED NAME. 55 
 
 things which we see other people doing. 
 This was the only cause of this little shift- 
 ing group of men and boys that kept its 
 place for a good while in the busy street, 
 into which some hundreds of men must have 
 been drawn, and which caused thousands 
 who did not pause to cast their eyes up- 
 ward in the same direction. 
 
 Now, if this principle of human nature 
 can produce such a striking result with so 
 slight materials, it can surely be made to 
 serve the higher interests of truth. If so 
 many men can be made to look up into the 
 sky so steadfastly when there is nothing to 
 be seen, simply because they see others gaz- 
 ing that way, they who look up steadfastly 
 into heaven and behold the glory of the 
 Lord may be able to turn the eyes of oth- 
 ers in the same direction. The unconscious 
 influence of reverent hearts and praising 
 lives will help to lift the thoughts of others 
 to the same sublime realities. 
 
 3. Of praising lives, I said. For it is not 
 chiefly by the reverent demeanor and the 
 
66 TEE LOED'8 PRAYER. 
 
 devout speech of God's children that the 
 glory of their father is promoted, but by 
 the fidelity and nobility and beauty of their 
 conduct. We who offer this prayer profess 
 to be his children. " Our Father," we say. 
 That is an acknowledgment of our relation 
 to him, of our duty to him. If we pro- 
 claim that he is our Father, then those 
 who do not acknowledge him will look. to 
 see what manner of spirit we are of. Chil- 
 dren are expected to resemble their parents, 
 in their characters as well as in their feat- 
 ures. And if in our lives men see the pu- 
 rity and truth, the manliness and honor, the 
 fidelity and charity that do belong to all 
 who learn of him and abide in his fellow- 
 ship and are transformed into his image, 
 they cannot help honoring him in whom 
 we live and move and have our beina;. 
 " The Christian," Professor Christlieb says, 
 "is the world's Bible." The Christian 
 shows men in his own life the beauty and 
 the loveliness of the divine nature. And 
 we who pray that God's name may be hal- 
 
THE SACRED NAME. 57 
 
 lowed and held in reverence can answer 
 our own prayer in no more effectual way 
 than by keeping our lives so clean and 
 bright that they may reflect his glory. 
 
 This first petition of the Lord's Prayer, 
 •without saying anything about it, deals a 
 most effective blow at the central evil in 
 human nature — our selfishness. Men are 
 apt to be nearly as selfish in their religion, 
 nearly as egoistic in their prayers, as in 
 any other part of their lives. But this pe- 
 tition turns their thoughts wholly away 
 from themselves. " Our Father who art in 
 heaven," we say ; and now that our thought 
 is lifted up to the Infinite Giver what shall 
 we ask for first? For the easing of our 
 pains, the supply of our wants, the pardon 
 of our sins, the saving of our souls, the wel- 
 fare of our friends ? No ; these are things 
 to ask for, but not first. " Hallowed be 
 thy name ! " Away from ourselves to God 
 our thought is quickly turned. "Begin to 
 pray," this petition says, "by ceasing to 
 think of yourselves ; by remembering that 
 
68 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 your small personality is not the centre 
 round which this universe revolves. " Seek 
 first the Kingdom of God and his righteous- 
 ness," is the Master's great command, and 
 here he frames it into the first petition of 
 the prayer that is to be always on our lips. 
 After this manner therefore pray ye. Self 
 must be the fulcrum on which your prayer 
 will rest, but it is not the power that lifts 
 you heavenward. ''^ It is by looking out, and 
 not in, by looking up, and not down, that 
 a man escapes from the bondage of sin into 
 the liberty of the sons of God. 
 
in. 
 
 THE ETERNAL KINGDOM. 
 Thy Kingdom come. — RIatt. vi. 10. 
 
 What is the Kingdom of God for whose 
 coming we are taught to pray in this sec- 
 ond petition of the Lord's Prayer? The 
 phrase is used with a variety of meanings in 
 the New Testament, sometimes in a narrow 
 sense as signifying phases of individual ex- 
 perience, sometimes in a large sense as in- 
 cluding all that the world has known or can 
 know of the power and the love of God. 
 We must suppose that the phrase is used 
 here in its largest sense. It is not likely 
 that in so brief a prayer as this any partial 
 meaning would be given to the words em- 
 ployed. 
 
 The orthodox Jews had a very narrow 
 idea of what the Kingdom of God was to 
 be. They thought that it was simply a po- 
 
60 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 litical machine to be set up at Jerusalem — 
 a monarchy, with a King designated b}'- di- 
 vine power, under which the autonomy of 
 the Jewish nation would be restored, the 
 Romans banished from the Holy Land, 
 and the territorial inheritance promised 
 to Abraham occupied by his descendants. 
 This was what they were looking for ; this 
 was the Messiah's Kingdom as they con- 
 ceived and expected it. Certain Pharisees 
 with this thought in their minds came to 
 our Lord one day, and demanded of him 
 when the Kingdom of God should come. 
 He answered them and said, " The King- 
 dom of God Cometh not with observa- 
 tion." " Comes not," as Robinson explains 
 this phrase, " so that its progress may be 
 watched with the eyes." " Neither shall 
 they say ' Lo here ! or, lo there ! ' " " None 
 shall be able," says Alford, " to point here 
 pr there for a proof of its coming." It is 
 not a matter of locality. Palestine is not 
 the territory of its dominion ; Jerusalem is 
 not the seat of its power. " Behold the 
 
THE ETERNAL KINGDOM. 61 
 
 Kingdom of God is within you ! " " The 
 Saviour," says Olshausen, "withdraws the 
 Kingdom of God wholly from the local and 
 phenomenal world and transfers it to the 
 world of spirit." 
 
 This, then, is our Lord's answer to the 
 Pharisees ; and it may be instructive to 
 many- in this day whose faith clings to a 
 material kingdom, who are waiting to hear 
 some one say " Lo here! or, lo there!" 
 
 " The Kingdom of God," says Paul in 
 his letter to the Romans, " is not meat and 
 drink." No ; and it is nothing that sub- 
 sists on meat and drink. Flesh and blood 
 do not inherit it, neither in this world nor 
 in the world to come. The throne of its 
 empire, the weapons of its warfare, are not 
 carnal. What is it, then ? " It is right- 
 eousness and peace and joy in the Holy 
 Ghost." That is Paul's definition of the 
 Kingdom of God. The Saviour tells us 
 where it is. It is not in Jerusalem ; it is 
 not visible anywhere to mortal eyes ; it is 
 unseen and spiritual. It is within you. 
 
62 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 Paul tells us Avhat it is. It is not meat and 
 drink, — it is not any material or earthly 
 organization with a visible head ; it is right- 
 eousness and peace and joy in the Holy 
 Ghost. 
 
 The Kingdom of God is then in its es- 
 sence a spiritual Kingdom ; the seat of his 
 dominion is in the thoughts and affections 
 of men ; the tokens of its sway are a deep- 
 ening purity, and a growing love among the 
 children of men. Of course it takes hold 
 on things outward, also, and shapes them 
 by its law, as we shall see by and by; it 
 changes the manners and the fashions and 
 the laws and the social relations of men ; it 
 is not in its essence meat and drink, but it 
 rules the lives of men who are its loyal sub- 
 jects whether they eat or drink or what- 
 ever they do. Still it affects the forms and 
 fashions of life only as it transforms the 
 thoughts and the desires of men; it works 
 from within outward ; its forces are all spir- 
 itual, though its manifestations are visible 
 in all the realms of life. And it includes 
 
THE ETERNAL KINGDOM. 63 
 
 everything that is true, everything that is 
 pure, everything that is lovely, everything 
 that is honest and brave and sound and 
 sweet in the universe. Whatsoever is good 
 is of God, and is a sign of the rule of his 
 Kingdom in the world. Whatever shows 
 improvement — whether it is from good to 
 better, or from worse to better — is a token 
 of the progress of God's Kingdom in the 
 world. Wherever morality and purity are 
 gaining, wherever the vile are becoming 
 less vile, and the cruel less cruel, and the 
 covetous less covetous, there the Kingdom 
 of God is advancing. " There is none good 
 but one, that is God," said our Lord him- 
 self ; and there is no good in any man, from 
 the feeblest virtue in the worst man to the 
 grandest integrity in the best man, — there 
 is no good in any beneficent institution or 
 in any kindly custom or in any refinement 
 of social life, — that is not a divine inspi- 
 ration; that is not the result of obedience 
 to the divine law; that is not, therefore, a 
 token of the presence and the prevalence in 
 some degree of God's Kingdom. 
 
64 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 When we intelligently offer this petition, 
 then, we are asking for nothing less than 
 this — that the light and love and power of 
 God may increase and abound everywhere 
 in the world. 
 
 I do not think we have the right to give 
 the words any narrower meaning than this. 
 
 " God's Kingdom is here already, then," 
 some one may say ; " why should we be 
 taught to pray for the coming of it ? To 
 say ' Thy Kingdom come ' is to imply that 
 it is not here." 
 
 To this question various answers are 
 given. To one of the most common of 
 these we have referred already. When 
 we pray, " Thy Kingdom come," some say 
 we are praying for the second coming of 
 Christ. But they who thus distinguish be- 
 tween the Father and the Son must re- 
 member that this is a prayer which the 
 Son bids us address to the Father. If there 
 is any difference between the Father's 
 Kingdom and the Son's Kingdom, it is the 
 
THE ETERNAL KINGDOM. 65 
 
 Father's Kingdom and not the Son's whose 
 coming we here supplicate. Besides, as it 
 has been intimated, we can hardly suppose" 
 that this sjDecial sense would be given to a 
 petition meant to be as comprehensive as 
 this one. It is far more natural to give it 
 a broader meaning. 
 
 Others say that this is a prayer for the 
 organization of Christianity. The King- 
 dom here intended, says one learned com- 
 mentator, is " the Messiah's Kingdom, which 
 in organized form had not yet come, but 
 was proclaimed by the Lord himself as at 
 hand." But I do not think that our Lord 
 ever cared so much for organization as to 
 make the fashioning of a form of church 
 government one of the main things to be 
 prayed for in so short a prayer as this. 
 No doubt organization is important ; but 
 it is altogether secondary, and secondary 
 things are not provided for in this prayer. 
 Besides, the church was organized in Jeru- 
 salem after the Pentecost, and it has al- 
 ways had an organization since. What- 
 6 
 
66 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 ever other defects may have been charged 
 upon it, it has not often been deficient in 
 organization since that day. It has gen- 
 erally had machinery enough, far too much. 
 So that this petition must have been practi- 
 cally obsolete ever since the days when the 
 first seven deacons were chosen. If, when 
 we say " Thy Kingdom come," we mean 
 only "Let thy church possess an organized 
 form," we are praying an utterly super- 
 fluous prayer. For there are few of us 
 who could honestly ask that the church 
 have any more of organized form than it 
 has to-day. One great trouble with it is, 
 that it has so much more machinery than 
 power. 
 
 To suppose, then, that the petition only 
 asks for the return of Jesus Christ in a 
 bodily form to earth, or for the organiza- 
 tion of his church, is to give it a meaning 
 altogether inadequate. It must have that 
 larger and more sj)iritual meaning which 
 we have already found in it. 
 
THE ETERNAL KINGDOM. 67 
 
 " But why then," the questioner per- 
 sists, " should we say ' Thy Kingdom 
 come ? ' " If God's Kingdom is the sum of 
 all beneficent forces, of all holy influences, 
 of all truth and all love and all righteous- 
 ness, why should we pray that it may come ? 
 It is here already. The world has never 
 been wholly destitute of righteousness. 
 God has never been without a witness on 
 the earth. Purity, truth, and love have al- 
 ways had a place on this planet. If they 
 belong to the foundations of God's King- 
 dom, then God's Kingdom has always been 
 here since the morning-stars first sang to- 
 gether and all the sons of God sliouted for 
 joy. Why then do we pray " Thy King- 
 dom come? " 
 
 Why do we wish or ask in these days 
 of March that summer may come? That 
 would surely be a proper wish and might 
 be a fitting prayer. Yet all the elemefits 
 of the summer are here to-day. The earth, 
 from whose fruitful breast the summer 
 springs, lies waiting here ; in her veins a 
 
68 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 myriad lives are throbbing ; the mighty- 
 prince of light whose kiss is to waken all 
 this life is shining down on us every day ; 
 air and light and moisture and warmth, all 
 the forces that make the summer, are here ; 
 every day the sun is wheeling his chariot 
 a little higher into the sky ; every day the 
 empire of the light enlarges, and the realm 
 of night is narroA^ed ; yet, though the ele- 
 ments and forces out of which the summer 
 comes are here, we might wish to have 
 them here in greater fullness and in greater 
 power. 
 
 If we should make our illustration more 
 specific it would not be any less pertinent. 
 Take the sunlight itself, the great source of 
 physical life upon this planet. It is here, 
 it has been here, who knows how many 
 ages? The tribes of earth have been rejoic- 
 ing in its beauty and nourishing them- 
 selves upon its vital heat since the mists of 
 the world's early morning first broke above 
 its watery wastes ; yet we do not cease to 
 desire that the sunlight may continue to 
 
THE ETERNAL KINGDOM. 69 
 
 come. We have it, but we still have need 
 of it ; there will never be a season when 
 we can dispense with its life-giving influ- 
 ence. 
 
 Now the analogy between these two re- 
 lations — that of the kingdom of life on 
 earth to the sun, and that of the Kingdom 
 of righteousness on earth to God — is very- 
 close. And if it is lawful and rational to 
 pray to the Father in heaven that he will 
 continue to send his sun upon the evil and 
 the good, then it is lawful and rational to 
 pray " Thy Kingdom come ! " If the first 
 prayer does not necessarily deny that the 
 kingdoms of life are already established on 
 the earth, the other does not necessarily 
 deny that the spiritual Kingdom of God is 
 already established on the earth. 
 
 The petition asks, then, not that right- 
 eousness and peace and joy in the Holy 
 Ghost may begin on the earth, for they be- 
 gun to be long ago ; but that they may con- 
 tinue, and that they may increase. Prob- 
 ably it is the increase of this Kingdom that 
 
70 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 is more specifically intended. It is a fuller, 
 a broader, a more glorious manifestation of 
 these great principles and forces. It is a 
 prayer that the lives which are not now 
 under their sway may be brought into sub- 
 jection to them ; that the institutions that 
 now are ruled by selfishness and strife may 
 be pervaded by them ; that the homes in 
 which vice and greed and worldliness now 
 reign may be cleansed and hallowed by the 
 spirit of purity and love ; that the societies 
 in which frivolity and vanity now rule 
 may be ruled by soberness and modesty 
 and quietness ; that many lands which are 
 now habitations of cruelty may hear and 
 obey the gospel of good-will. 
 
 It is not a prayer that the leaven may be 
 brought and placed in the measures of meal, 
 but that its subtle, transforming influence 
 may extend until it shall pervade the whole 
 lump. It is not a prayer that the mustard 
 seed may be planted, but that its growth 
 may be hastened by the gentle dews of 
 God's grace and the sunlight of his truth 
 
THE ETERNAL KINGDOM. 71 
 
 until it shall become a great tree whose 
 branches shall be vocal with the songs of 
 Paradise, and in whose shade all the weary 
 of the world may rest. 
 
 This is, then, the most comprehensive 
 petition of the Lord's prayer. Indeed it 
 is the most comprehensive petition that 
 it is possible for man to ntter ; there is 
 hardly anything that we ask for that is not 
 summed up in this prayer. It is a prayer 
 that the whole world may grow better and 
 brighter ; that all the people in the world 
 may grow gentler and stronger and truer 
 and kinder and happier year by year. And 
 it is a recognition of the fact that this can 
 come to pass only as the world is filled 
 with the knowledge of God and ruled by 
 his law ; only as the people in the world 
 come to know him better and to obey him 
 more perfectly. 
 
 It is a prayer that has been answered 
 too, how many times, and how abundantly I 
 People sometimes question whether prayer 
 
72 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 is ever answered ; but here is a prayer that 
 Christians have been offering now for eight- 
 een hundred years, and if you want to 
 know whether it has been answered read 
 the whole of history since Christ ascended. 
 " Thy Kingdom come ! " the disciiDles 
 prayed ; and presently a bloody persecution 
 fell upon them in Jerusalem, and drove 
 them forth from the Holy City and made 
 them homeless wanderers. That was a 
 strange way of answering the prayer. But 
 " they that were scattered abroad went 
 everywhere preaching the word." Up and 
 down the rugged roads of Palestine they 
 went proclaiming the glad tidings of great 
 joy. It was not long before the messen- 
 gers found their way over the heights of 
 Mount Taurus, and here and there a centre 
 of light was kindled in the dark provinces 
 of Asia Minor; then the voice came to Paul 
 summoning him to Macedonia, and Europe 
 was invaded by the intrepid apostle, who 
 planted the standard of the Gospel on the 
 classic field of Philippi and on the heights 
 
THE ETERNAL KINGDOM. 73 
 
 of the Areopagus. From these small be- 
 ginnings the leaven of Christianity has 
 spread, until now nearly a third part of the 
 human race acknowledge Jesus Christ as 
 Lord. 
 
 This is simply putting into three sen- 
 tences the story of the outward progress 
 in the world of that specialized and organ- 
 ized manifestation of God's truth which we 
 call the Christian religion. And while we 
 freely admit that these peoples that are 
 now called Christian are far from compre- 
 hending Christianity in its highest excel- 
 lence a,nd beauty, we may safely say that 
 there is not one among them to which 
 Christianity has not proved a blessing ; not 
 one whose darkness it has not enlightened, 
 whose life it has not lifted up ; not one in 
 which there is not more of righteousness 
 and peace and heavenly hope and joy than 
 there would have been if the people had 
 not heard of the coming of the Son of man. 
 
 But the progress of God's Kingdom in 
 the world has not been confined to Chris- 
 
74 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 tian lands, nor even to the Christian era. 
 It is a prayer that devout men have always 
 been offering and that God has always been 
 answering. When Gautama Siddhartha, 
 in the Indian city of Kapilavastu, four or 
 five hundred years before the coming of our 
 Lord, learned and taught the great renun- 
 ciation, the Kingdom of God drew near to 
 all those Eastern lands. For tliougb the 
 doctrines of Buddhism are but a partial rev- 
 elation of God's truth and love, and though 
 the rays of light that were mingled with its 
 darkness have been greatly blurred by the 
 perversions and corruptions of later days, 
 yet there was truth in it, and the truth in 
 it was God's truth ; and there was love in 
 it, and it was God's love shed abroad in the 
 heart of Gautama ; and it lifted millions of 
 people up to a higher and purer life, and 
 there was more of righteousness and more 
 of peace and more of holy joy in their 
 hearts and in their homes because of it ; 
 and therefore we know that it was not 
 wholly the kingdom of the evil one, but 
 
TEE ETERNAL KINGDOM. 75 
 
 the Kingdom of God that Gautama Sid- 
 dhartha, in some blind and imperfect way, 
 was building, God had some better thing 
 for us than he had for either Jews or Bud- 
 dhists ; but he had some good thing for 
 them too ; and the light that they saw, 
 though it shone through many mists of su- 
 perstition, was a beam from the Eternal 
 Sun of righteousness. And so in other 
 lands, Christian and Pagan, God has been 
 preparing the ways by which his Kingdom 
 may come into the world, by which it may 
 enter and take possession of the lives of 
 men and work from within outward in 
 their languages and their laws and their 
 arts and their social customs. 
 
 " Thy Kingdom come ! " good Christians 
 prayed. And he who hears the cry of his 1 
 children came down to earth and stretched 
 forth his hand to woman, so long the slave 
 of man's power, and the drudge of his in- 
 dolence, and the victim of his passions, and 
 lifted her up, and clothed her motherhood 
 with dignity, and her womanhood with di- 
 
76 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 vinity, and gave us by her hand the bless- 
 ing of home, the best of all earth's precious 
 things. 
 
 " Thy Kingdom come ! " the strong of 
 faith were crying ; and a Presence unseen 
 by men stood among the prisoners in the 
 dungeons that were festering dens of dis- 
 ease and vileness, and laid its gentle hand 
 upon these hapless children of the evil, and 
 lifted the weight of hate and scorn that 
 made their lot so desperate, and sought to 
 lead them forth to ways of purity. 
 
 " Thy Kingdom come ! " God's children 
 cried ; and the victims of insanity saw a 
 beam of hope through the mental darkness 
 in which they were walking, and found 
 themselves no longer chained and scourged 
 like criminals, but gently led and kindly 
 treated. 
 
 " Thy Kingdom come ! " was the voice 
 of millions who groaned in slavery, and of 
 millions more who remembered their breth- 
 ren in bonds as bound with them ; and one 
 by one the fetters have snapped asunder, — 
 
THE ETERNAL KINGDOM. 77 
 
 the strong shackles of the Roman law, the 
 wounding cords of feudal villenage, the de- 
 grading toils of British slavery, the pre- 
 scriptive manacles of Russian serfdom, — 
 until even in our own land, and in our ovn 
 day,— 
 
 *' Our eyes hare seen the glory of the coming of the Lord," 
 
 as he comes proclaiming liberty through- 
 out the land to all the inhabitants thereof. 
 
 " Thy Kingdom come ! " the children of 
 the light were pleading ; and the hierarch- 
 ies that sought to confine the thought of 
 men were baffled and paralyzed, and the 
 Bible was unchained, and the ways that 
 lead to the mercy-seat were opened to the 
 feet of all penitent believers. 
 
 Thus it is by these mighty changes which 
 have liberated and elevated and enlight- 
 ened the children of men that God's King- 
 dom has been coming through all the ages, 
 with increasing glory and enlarging power. 
 Sometimes we hear the voice of his herald 
 crying, " Who is this that cometh from 
 
78 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrab, 
 glorious in his apparel, traveling in the 
 greatness of his strength? He who hath 
 trodden down the people in his wrath and 
 trampled upon them in his fury." Some- 
 times the voice cries, "How beautiful upon 
 the mountains are the feet of him that 
 bringeth salvation, that publisheth peace ! " 
 But whether he come in his might with 
 confused noise and garments rolled in blood, 
 or whether he come in his gentleness, steal- 
 ing in by all sweet influences to men's 
 hearts, and kindling in them better wishes 
 and kindlier feelings, — he is always com- 
 ing ; and the prayer that his children night 
 and day are lifting to his throne is an- 
 swered speedily, — yea with the light of 
 every sunrising and the smile of every 
 watching star. 
 
 And now, we come to ask whether there 
 is anything we can do toward the answer- 
 ing of this prayer. Truly we can do much 
 and in many ways. " Though the greatest,' 
 
THE ETERNAL KINGDOM. 79 
 
 says Mr. Ruskiu, " it is that everlasting 
 Kingdom which the poorest of us can ad- 
 vance. We cannot hasten Christ's coming. 
 ' Of the day and the hour knoweth none.' 
 But the Kingdom of God is as a grain of 
 mustard seed ; we can sow of it : it is as a 
 foam-globe of leaven ; we can mingle it : 
 and its glory and its joy are that even the 
 birds of the air can lodge in the branches 
 of it." 
 
 Even the children can help to bring, in 
 many places, this Kingdom of God for which 
 they daily pray. I heard a mother telling 
 the other day of her children who had quar- 
 reled sometimes, as many children do, I fear, 
 but who had both been made so thoroughly 
 sorry and ashamed on account of one of their 
 quarrels that they were careful for many 
 days after that not to say a bitter word, or 
 to do a hateful deed. So peace came to that 
 home through the prayer and the watching 
 of these two Christian children ; and peace, 
 you know, is one of the signs of the Kingdom 
 of God in the world. And I hope that when 
 
80 THE LORD'S PRAYER, 
 
 the children offer this prayer they will re- 
 member that this is one of the ways in 
 which it is answered, and in which they 
 may help in answering it. 
 
 And wherever we help one another to the 
 living of better lives, — to be more truthful 
 or upright or honorable or kind, to be more 
 faithful in our duties to God or to men, — 
 there we are helping to answer our prayer, 
 and to hasten the coming of God's Kingdom. 
 
 You offer this prayer sometimes, many of 
 you, most of you, I trust. Do you always 
 stop to think what it means ? For it has a 
 personal bearing. I have said that it is a 
 very comprehensive petition, and so it is ; 
 but it has a very direct application to the 
 life of every individual who utters it. It is 
 like the " whosoever " of the Gospel ; what 
 makes it such a momentous word to me is 
 the fact that it means me. 
 
 You pray that the Kingdom of God may 
 come ? Do you want it to come to Massa- 
 chusetts ? Do you desire that it should 
 come to Springfield ? Do you wish to have 
 
THE ETERNAL KINGDOM. 81 
 
 it come to your store, your office, your sliop^ 
 your study, your table, your toilet, your 
 closet, your heart ? 
 
 How near to you do you desire that the 
 Kingdom of God should come ? 
 6 
 
IV. 
 
 THE BLESSED WILL. 
 
 Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. 
 
 Matt. vi. 10. 
 
 This petition differs from the one which 
 precedes it mainly in being more specific 
 and personal. When we pray " Thy King- 
 dom come!" our thought goes more natu- 
 rally to the whole grand result which God 
 is working out in the world. We may and 
 must think of the relation of this Kingdom 
 to our own lives ; but the primary sugges- 
 tion is that of the universal prevalence of 
 the Kingdom as an object of desire. 
 
 When we say " Thy will be done," the 
 application to ourselves is more distinctly 
 made. We think less of the whole than of 
 the parts which compose it ; yet we know 
 that when the will of God shall be done 
 by all that the Kingdom of God will have 
 fully come. 
 
THE BLESSED WILL. 83 
 
 This petition doubtless conveys to many 
 of those who use it a lesson of simple sub- 
 mission. They suppose that it is the prayer 
 of a passive rather than of an active faith. 
 Mr. Ruskin says that many of the most 
 earnest Christians always speak these words 
 " as if their Father's will were always to 
 kill their babies, or do something unpleas- 
 ant to them." 
 
 Undoubtedly the prayer does include the 
 thought of submission to the will of God. 
 Sometimes the will of God conflicts with 
 our plans, runs counter to our wishes, dis- 
 turbs our repose, and then it is necessary 
 that we should submit. In such times it is 
 good for us to be able to say from the heart, 
 " Thy will be done ; " and therefore it is 
 well for us to settle it in our thoughts be- 
 forehand that his will is a good will, and 
 ought to be done ; and that though for the 
 present it may seem grievous, it is sure to 
 bring forth the peaceable fruits of righteous- 
 ness in all who trust Him, and wait upon ~ 
 his word. 
 
84 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 There is a mistake just here, however, 
 against which we must be watching. It is 
 possible to be too submissive. Submissive- 
 ness may degenerate into supineness. We 
 ought to be measurably sure that the ills 
 that threaten us are coming upon us by the 
 will of God before we submit to them. 
 
 A man is sitting upon a steep hill-side in 
 the spring-time when he hears a noise, and, 
 looking up, perceives a huge rock that has 
 been loosened by the frost rolling down 
 upon him. It is evident that the rock will 
 pass directly over the place where he is sit- 
 ting, and though there is time for him to 
 escape he sits still, saying, " It seems to be 
 the will of the Lord that I should perish 
 here, and his will be done." But this is 
 not the will of God in the truest sense of 
 the word. The will of God is that the man 
 shall escape ; the noise that warns him is 
 the call that summons him to escape ; his 
 sitting still is not trusting God, nor submit- 
 ting to God, but tempting God most wick- 
 edly. 
 
THE BLESSED WILL. 85 
 
 A man is suffering from dyspepsia, tlie 
 result of his own imprudence in the use of 
 food ; or from nervous headache, the re- 
 sult of an intemperate indulgence in to- 
 bacco ; and though he does not mend his 
 habits, we hear him talk in the midst of his 
 sufferings about being submissive to the 
 trial God has put upon him. All suffering, 
 he says, comes from the hand of God ; it is 
 his will that I should suffer; his will be 
 done. But it is not God's will that this 
 man should suffer ; this is not the portion 
 that God has chosen for him ; it is the por- 
 tion that he has chosen for himself. He is 
 altogether too submissive. 
 
 The income of a family is cut off and 
 they are left in distress. They make some 
 efforts to find employment and livelihood, 
 but they do not readily obtain what they 
 seek, and presently they settle down into 
 what seems to them a pious resignation to 
 the decrees of Providence, but what their 
 neighbors think is utter shiftlessness. I 
 have known a number of families that were 
 
86 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 quite too submissive to "what they called 
 tlie will of the Lord. More grit and less 
 resignation would have kept them in better 
 circumstances. 
 
 It is only in a secondary sense that suf- 
 fering can ever be said to be the will of 
 God. His will is expressed in his laws ; 
 obedience to his laws brings health and 
 happiness and peace ; disobedience brings 
 suffering. His will is that men should 
 obey his laws ; but that if they do not obey 
 they shall suffer. The suffering is a warn- 
 ing against disobedience, and a dissuasive 
 from it. 
 
 It is true that men are so linked together 
 by ties of hereditary and of social organiza- 
 tion that suffering may come upon me as a 
 result of the disobedience of my ancestors 
 or of my neighbors. Sometimes by dili- 
 gence and patience I can reach the causes 
 of this suffering and remove them ; when I 
 can that is my duty ; when I cannot, then 
 right reason and filial trust call on me to 
 submit. 
 
TEE BLESSED WILL. 87 
 
 Suppose I come into the world witli a 
 hereditary tendency to consumption or par- 
 alysis, the result of the disobedience of 
 some of my ancestors to the laws of health. 
 Now it may be possible for me, by prudence 
 and temperance, to counterwork these ten- 
 dencies and to preserve and confirm my 
 health. There ai^e remedial and restorative 
 forces in my physical system that may re- 
 pair the damages that have been entailed 
 upon me, if these damages are not too seri- 
 ous. It is my business to give these reme- 
 dial forces a chance to do their proper work. 
 They are the highest and most perfect ex- 
 pression in my nature of the will of God ; 
 and it is this part of the will of God that I 
 must be most careful to have done. 
 
 But it is possible that the injuries which 
 I have inherited are so serious that the nat- 
 ural remedial forces will not repair them, 
 no matter how great care I may exercise ; 
 when this is so I must submit. Shall I say 
 that the suffering which I endure as the 
 consequence of these inherited injuries, by 
 
88 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 wliich my days are burdened and my life is 
 shortened, comes upon me by the will of 
 God ? Yes ; there is no other way of ex- 
 plaining it. It is in the nature of things 
 that disobedience should bring suffering not 
 only to him who disobeys, but often to his 
 children and his children's children for 
 many generations ; and the nature of things, 
 as Mr. Joseph Cook says, is " the total out- 
 come of God's free choice." The universe 
 is so made that sin not only inflicts but en- 
 tails suffering ; and God made the universe. 
 The suffering that is inherited is not, how- 
 ever, penalty ; it is no sign that God is dis- 
 pleased with me ; it may be a means of 
 grace to me, if I will rightly use it. And 
 this is where the duty of submission comes 
 in : the patient endurance of ills that can- 
 not be mended is a part of the divine dis- 
 cipline in which we must all be exercised. 
 There are plenty of pains and infirmities 
 and troubles that we are not to blame for, 
 and that we cannot help ; we may not al- 
 ways understand the reasons of them ; but 
 
THE BLESSED WILL. 89 
 
 we do know that the God under whose wise 
 laws they are visited upon us is infinite 
 Love, and that in some way, if we rightly 
 use them, they will work together for good 
 to us ; and therefore, in the midst of such 
 suffering, we are ready to say to him, 
 " Thy will be done." 
 
 There is room, then, in the Christian ex- 
 perience for submission, and reason enough 
 why we should often put this passive sense 
 into this petition. But I am afraid that 
 we often provoke our Heavenly Father by 
 substituting submission for obedience ; by 
 lying still and piously taking the conse- 
 quences of disobedience, instead of rising up 
 and obeying ; by enduring his will in the 
 shape of penalty, instead of studying and 
 doing his will, as it is made known to us in 
 the laws of the universe, and thus avoiding 
 the penalty. 
 
 A city is suffering from some epidemic ; 
 one family after another is invaded by the 
 destroyer, and the mourners go about the 
 streets. In the midst of the sorrow, many 
 
90 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 devout expressions of submission to the will 
 of God are heard. But this scourge is not, 
 I say, in the deepest and truest sense of the 
 word, the will of God. His will is that 
 people shall find out and obey the laws of 
 health ; they suffer in this way, only be- 
 cause they fail to do his will. The epi- 
 demic is not his first choice for this people, 
 but his second choice ; it is not the result 
 of an arbitrary decree ; it is conditional 
 upon their disobedience ; the epidemic re- 
 sults from causes for which men are respon- 
 sible, and which men are bound to find and 
 remove. And over every such suffering 
 community, where the black shadow of the 
 pestilence darkens the homes of the people, 
 and the faces of men are pale with feai', the 
 infinite Compassion is brooding, and the in- 
 finite Patience is crying, " I have no pleas- 
 ure in the death of him that dieth, .... 
 wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye! " 
 
 They who do the will of the Lord, then, 
 please him far more than they who suffer 
 his will ; and the principal meaning of this 
 
THE BLESSED WILL. 91 
 
 petition is that God will help us in doing 
 his will, rather than that he will give us 
 patience in enduring the sufferings that re- 
 sult from disobedience. That qualifying 
 clause of the petition to which we have not 
 yet referred makes this very plain. " Thy 
 will be done on earth as it is in heaven." 
 But it is not by endurance and submission 
 that the will of God is done in heaven. It 
 is not in sorrow and bereavement that the 
 angels and the just men made perfect sit 
 down in the mansions above, saying, " Thy 
 will, O God, be done ! " In heaven God's 
 will is not enforced as penalty upon his 
 children ; there is no need of that ; it is 
 done by his children. And it is not done 
 by them as a servant does his master's will, 
 but in a free, hearty, loving, intelligent, 
 obedience. The voice of him who said 
 " Lo I come ; in the volume of the book it 
 is written of me, I delight to do thy will, 
 O my God: yea thy law is within my 
 heart," is the voice of all that glorified 
 company. This is the very definition of 
 
92 TEE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 heaven. Heaven is that place where all 
 the creatures of God know and do his will ; 
 therefore there is and can be for them no 
 sorrow, no pain, no death. Being con- 
 formed to his will they are made partakers 
 of his nature, and thus enter into peace and 
 blessedness and everlasting life. 
 
 Now, we are taught to pray, " Tby will 
 be done as in heaven, so in earth," — as by 
 angels and the glorified, so by mortals. 
 This means not endurance, but intelligent 
 and joyful obedience. 
 
 I am sure, my brethren, that we have not 
 given sufficient emphasis in our religious 
 life to this meaning of the petition. Our 
 religion has been occupied far more in seek- 
 ing to save us from the consequences of 
 disobedience, than in seeking to understand 
 and obey the will of God. Doubtless we 
 have all disobeyed God's will, and are not 
 only suffering the present consequences of 
 disobedience, but are also exposed to other 
 and more serious consequences in the fut- 
 ure: doubtless it is necessary for us to 
 
THE BLESSED WILL. 93 
 
 study how we may escape from these ; but 
 after all it is no more important that we 
 should be delivered from the penalties of 
 past disobedience than that we should study 
 to be obedient in the present. A child 
 who was always trying to evade punish- 
 ment for past offenses, or beseeching you 
 to forgive them, and who yet kept right 
 on recklessly disregarding your commands, 
 would seem to you neither filial nor dutiful. 
 Penitence and reconciliation on account of 
 past misdeeds are well, as far as they go, 
 but they must not take the place of present 
 obedience. 
 
 Let us try to remember, then, that our 
 religion ought to show us not only how we 
 may be forgiven for not having done God's 
 ■will in the past, but how we may do it in 
 the time to come. Let us remember that 
 God is better pleased with us when we are 
 doing his will than when we are suffering 
 the consequences of disobedience, or when 
 we are suing to be forgiven. 
 
94 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 To do God's will we must know what it 
 is. How shall we find it out ? 
 
 The first and most obvious answer to this 
 question is that his will has been revealed, 
 and that we find it in his Word. And if 
 we remember that the Bible is the history 
 of the moral progress of the Jewish nation 
 out of barbarism into civilization under the 
 Divine guidance, and that many of the com- 
 mands given were accommodated to the low 
 moral condition of the people, and contain, 
 therefore, an imperfect morality ; if we re- 
 member that it is in the teachings of Christ, 
 who fulfilled the law in righteousness, that 
 the perfect revelation of the will of God is 
 to be found, then that answer may stand. 
 The Bible does make known to us the will 
 of God, only let us be sure that we know 
 how and where to look for it. Some of the 
 commands of the Bible are local and tem- 
 porary ; even some of the principles incor- 
 porated into the ancient legislation are ob- 
 solete. They belonged to the scaffolding 
 with which God was building his temple, 
 
THE BLESSED WILL. 95 
 
 and not to the temple itself. But there 
 are also many commands of the Bible that 
 are of universal obligation. The words of 
 Christ, as I have said, are the perfect ut- 
 terance of God's will. And those holy 
 men who were taught by Christ himself, 
 and who were inspired of God to teach and 
 preach his Gospel, have given us in their 
 Epistles, and especially in the last chapters 
 of them, in which they teach of practical 
 religion, a clear expression of God's will, 
 In the thirteentli chapter of First Corinth- 
 ians, for example, you will find a revelation 
 of God's will as distinct and perfect as it is 
 possible to put into language. The same 
 thing is true of the twelfth chapter of the 
 Epistle to the Romans, and the third chap- 
 ter of the Epistle to the Colossians, and the 
 sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Gala- 
 tians, and tlie whole of the Epistle of James, 
 and many such passages. I am not saying 
 that the whole Bible is not profitable for 
 doctrine, for reproof, and for instruction in 
 righteousness ; I am only pointing out those 
 
96 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 portions of it in which that part of the will 
 of God which we ought to do is most clearly- 
 set forth. 
 
 Our Lord himself has condensed the 
 whole of God's law into two short com- 
 mandments : — 
 
 " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
 all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and 
 with all thy mind," and, — 
 
 " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy- 
 self." 
 
 He who perfectly obeys these two com- 
 mands perfectly does God's will. 
 
 So then we find in this Holy Book such 
 a declaration to us of the will of God as 
 may serve to guide our feet into the ways 
 of obedience. If we study the Word with 
 a prayerful and teachable miud, we shall 
 know more of his will than we shall ever 
 find time and strength to do. 
 
 " But is there not danger that men 
 will misunderstand these teachings of the 
 Bible?" some one asks. "May they not 
 often interpret these words to mean what 
 
THE BLESSED WILL. 97 
 
 they do not mean ? Is it not trtie that dif- 
 ferent persons and different sects give to 
 these words various and even contradictory- 
 meanings?" Yes; to a certain extent that 
 is true. Still I do not think there has been 
 so much dispute concerning the will of God, 
 as revealed in the Scripture, as concerning 
 the methods of God's working. It is the 
 philosophy of religion, or the forms of re- 
 ligion, that men quarrel about more than 
 the principles and rules of conduct. It is 
 not concerning what God requires of them 
 that they disagree, so much as it is con- 
 cerning what his thoughts and counsels and 
 purposes are for the whole universe. And 
 the fact is that if these wrangling sectaries 
 would make it their main business for a 
 little while just to find out that part of the 
 will of the Lord which they can surely know 
 and which they ought to be doing, — and 
 then would do it, — all the disputing and 
 quarreling would speedily come to an end. 
 
 It is not, then, so difficult as some may 
 think to find to find out, by reading the 
 
 7 
 
98 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 Word of God, what God's will is. No one 
 will go far astray who applies his o^vii com- 
 mon sense to the task of finding in the 
 words of Christ and of his apostles what 
 the Lord would have him to do. But he 
 may have a better guide than his own com- 
 mon sense. It is not necessary that he 
 should lean wholly to his own understand- 
 ing. That may mislead him. He may 
 have the enlightenment of the Holy Ghost 
 as he studies the Holy Word. A sancti- 
 fied common sense is a safer interpreter of 
 'the Word of God than learning and genius 
 unsanctified. 
 
 Following this guide, therefore, we may 
 find in the Bible a bright revelation of the 
 will of God. And if, in all our study of 
 the Bible, we sought this mainly — to find 
 things to do — to get hints as to the kind of 
 work God has for us, in the cleansing of 
 our lives, and in the serving of him and 
 of our neighbors in the world ; if we went 
 to it as to an order-book in which we ex- 
 pected to find some definite direction for 
 
THE BLESSED WILL. 99 
 
 the doing of God's will to-day, — I am sure 
 that our study of the Bible would do us 
 much more good than it now does. We 
 are too apt to read the Bible and study the 
 Bible as a mere perfunctory service. It is 
 a thing to be gone through with, there is 
 so much Bible reading or Bible study to be 
 done ; it is a duty, and when it is done it 
 is done, like any other duty. Or else we 
 fall into the habit of thinking that there is 
 a certain charm about it ; that the study of 
 the Bible in some mysterious way has a 
 kind of alterative effect upon the charac- 
 ter; so that to spend a certain time every 
 week reading it will prove to be a means 
 of grace. If we could get rid of all such 
 formal and superstitious notions, and just 
 remember that our main business with the 
 Bible is to find out from it what God wants 
 us to do, the book would speedily come to 
 have new meaning and value. 
 
 I do not think that I have exaggerated 
 the importance of the Bible as a chart for 
 the guidance of men in doing God's will. 
 
100 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold is not much of a be- 
 liever, but he says that conduct is three 
 fourths of life, and that the Bible, far 
 above all other books, is the book of con- 
 duct. We shall be safe, I am sure, in 
 adopting his maxim, so that while we pray 
 " Thy will be done," we may search the 
 Scriptui-es to find each day how to help in 
 answering our prayer — what part of God's 
 will we ought each day to be doing. 
 
 But while the principles on which we 
 ought to act are clearly set down in the 
 teachings of Christ and his apostles, ancj 
 while many applications of these principles 
 are suggested also in the Word of God, our 
 study of nature and of providence ought 
 to throw much light upon the ways in 
 which these principles are to be worked 
 out. For God's will is revealed not only 
 in the Bible, but also in nature and in 
 providence. We learn the will of God as 
 we learn the will of a man, not only by 
 attending to what he has said, but by ob- 
 
THE BLESSED WILL. 101 
 
 serving what he is doing. His works quite 
 as distinctly as his words indicate his will. 
 
 So when I pluck in the meadow a violet 
 or a crow-foot bloom, and look it in the 
 face and see how deftly its petals are carved 
 and how daintily they are painted, then I 
 learn a little of what God's will is. Such 
 a thing of beauty as this is an expression 
 of his thought and of his love. He no 
 more wills that I should be holy than that 
 this flower should be beautiful. And al- 
 though the flowers are not all perfect ; al- 
 though in an unkindly environment some 
 of them have been maimed and scarred; yet 
 of this we are always sure, that the flower 
 which is most beautiful comes nearest to 
 being the flower that God meant to make 
 and did make in the beginning. 
 
 So when we see a human being of good 
 stature and fair proportions, with a clear 
 eye and a ruddy skin, and the wholesome 
 beauty that springs from perfect health, 
 we are able to say with equal assurance 
 that God's will is revealed in the body 
 
102 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 wMcli that soul inhabits, however poorly 
 it may be done by the inhabitant. And 
 though there are many decrepit and dis- 
 eased bodies in which human beings make 
 their liomes, yet we are sure that those 
 bodies which are soundest and most sym- 
 metrical and most beautiful are the near- 
 est like what God means all the bodies of 
 men to be. 
 
 In like manner when we meet with a 
 human life that is upright and modest and 
 pure and beneficent, based on firm princi- 
 ples of justice and honor, working quietly 
 but energetically for the building up of 
 righteousness, — we know that God's will 
 is revealed in such a life as this more per- 
 fectly than any words can tell it, more 
 clearly than any flower can show it, more 
 fully than the shapeliest form and the 
 comeliest face can reveal it. 
 
 And when we go into a home in which 
 love is the law, in which each member of 
 the household seeks to live worthily, and in 
 which all conspire together to seek one an- 
 
THE BLESSED WILL. 103 
 
 other's welfare and happiness, so that the 
 law of the home seems to be, Each for all 
 and all for each, — then we are sure that 
 God's will is made known to us in the life 
 of this household ; that something like this 
 is what he would have every home to be. 
 
 And if we should find ourselves in a 
 community where peace and order and 
 temperance and thrift and industry and 
 contentment abounded ; where there was 
 no squalid poverty, and no filth-breeding 
 pestilence, and no enormous fortunes, and 
 no profligate expenditures of wealth, and 
 no extortionate capitalists who kept them- 
 selves wholly aloof from the work-people 
 by whose labor they were enriched, and 
 cared not, so long as their dividends were 
 undiminished, how fast the laborers were 
 pauperized and brutalized ; where there 
 were no eye-servants, that worked only 
 when they were watched, and no discon- 
 tented and surly and suspicious employees ; 
 where the law of good-will had prevailed 
 over the law of supply and demand, mak- 
 
104 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 ing peace where once was strife, and spread- 
 ing plenty where once was poverty, — if 
 we ever should find such a community as 
 that we should know of a surety that God's 
 will had found expression in its corporate 
 life ; we should say with confidence that 
 every community on earth would be like 
 this community when his will should be 
 done on earth as it is done in heaven. 
 
 In short, my friends, we know that God 
 wills that beauty and health and sym- 
 metry and vigor and virtue and courage 
 and charity and fidelity and tenderness and 
 love and joy and peace and good-will shall 
 increase and abound everywhere on the 
 earth ; and that whenever we plant a seed 
 in the secret place that will bring forth such 
 fruit as this, or whenever we say a word or 
 do a deed that will lead to such result as 
 this, we are helping to answer this prayer. 
 Answered it will be in God's own time, in 
 God's own way. His will shall be done 
 everywhere upon the earth as it is done in 
 heaven. He never taught his children to 
 
THE BLESSED WILL. 105 
 
 offer a prayer that he did not mean to an- 
 swer. It only remains for us to put our- 
 selves in line with the divine purposes, re- 
 membering that this prayer is not the voice 
 of supineness and quietism, but that the 
 words are fit to hold all the energies of our 
 greatest hopes and our strongest volitions. 
 Let us learn here on earth, not only to en- 
 dure God's will, -when it thwarts our plans 
 and takes away our pleasures, but to do his 
 will with swift and glad obedience, as it is 
 done by strong angels and happy saints in 
 heaven. 
 
V. 
 
 THE CONVENIENT EOOD. 
 Give us this day our daily bread. — Matt. vi. 11. 
 
 We come now to the first petition of the 
 Lord's Prayer that expresses a personal 
 want of the petitioner. By all that has 
 gone before this we have been taken out of 
 and away from ourselves ; we have lifted 
 up to God the voice of reverent and filial 
 love, acknowledging him as our Father ; we 
 have prayed that his Name may be honored 
 and sanctified in the thoughts of men ; that 
 his Kingdom of righteousness and peace and 
 joy in the Holy Ghost may be established 
 and promoted ; and that his Holy Will may 
 be done in earth by men as it is done by 
 saints and angels in heaven. We have not 
 thought as yet of our own necessities. If 
 we have wants we have not considered 
 them, and half of the prayer is said already. 
 
THE CONVENIENT FOOD. 107 
 
 Our minds have been led away over the 
 universe of God ; we have been made to 
 take in the great purposes of the divine 
 love, and the great attributes of the divine 
 character; and now with this preparation 
 we come to think of our own personal 
 needs. Plainly, we shall not be quite so 
 selfish, quite so insistent, quite so queru- 
 lous in our petitioning as we should have 
 been if we had. not been lifted up and led 
 forth along these higher paths. 
 
 " Give us this day our daily bread." 
 Shall we use these words literally, or shall 
 we give them a spiritual signification ? Is 
 it food for our bodies or for our souls, or 
 both, that we ask for in these words ? I 
 incline to the opinion held by the majority 
 of expositors that the petition is to be taken 
 in the plainest sense ; that it asks for a sup- 
 ply of food for our bodies. This is indeed 
 one of the primary necessities. Light and 
 air God gives us freely ; after these indis- 
 pensables food comes next in order of im- 
 
108 TEE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 portance ; and this is not, ordinarily, made 
 ready to our hand in nature. Some labor 
 is necessary to procure it, some care to hus- 
 band it ; it becomes an object of thought 
 and desire as light and air do not ; and 
 therefore it is something to be prayed for. 
 Our Lord teaches us to pray for it ; and 
 in this petition we have a clear warrant for 
 praying for temporal mercies. Surely if it 
 is lawful to pray for a thing as common as 
 daily bread, it is lawful to pray for any- 
 thing we need. We may not see how God 
 can give us these gifts we ask for without 
 working a miracle, but that is no reason 
 why we should refuse to ask for them ; he 
 is able to do for us exceeding abundantly 
 above all that we ever ask or think. 
 
 1. The first thought suggested, then, is 
 that of our dependence on him to whom we 
 pray. Every good and perfect gift is from 
 him — this one, surely, not less than the 
 rest. For health to earn our daily bread, 
 for wisdom to keep it and use it, we de- 
 
THE CONVENIENT FOOD. 109 
 
 pencl upon his'goodness. The habit of con- 
 necting our commonest gifts with the great 
 Giver is a habit that we may well cultivate. 
 It is thus that life is sanctified and enno- 
 bled. " Take away this divine symbolism 
 from our material existence," says James 
 Martineau, " and let it stand only for what 
 it can make good on its own account, and 
 Avhat is there to redeem it from selfishness 
 and insignificance ? The home sinks into a 
 house, the meal into a mess, the grave into 
 a pit." Our daily bread is not a thing too 
 little for God to give, nor too vulgar for 
 him to bless ; and when with reverent faith 
 it is thus received as a gift from him, the 
 breaking of it is a sacrament, and the real 
 presence of the infinite love is in the heart 
 of the man who partakes of it with thanks- 
 giving. 
 
 2. For daily Iread^ we are bidden to 
 ask. The word is specific, not generic. It 
 signifies, primarily, bread. There is an- 
 other word which means food in general. 
 
110 TEE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 The use of this word in this place seems to 
 hint that it is only for plain and simple food 
 that we ought to make our requests unto 
 God. It is not, Give us this day our bill of 
 fare, — our daily three courses ; it is, Give 
 us this day our daily bread. It is a prayer 
 that the epicure would hardly think of of- 
 fering. And while we need not adopt any 
 ascetic theories about meat or drink, we 
 may surely attend to the suggestion con- 
 veyed in this petition of a simple and whole- 
 some diet, and may endeavor to make our 
 practices tally with our prayers. 
 
 3. Give us this day our daily bread. The 
 word here rendered daily has been the sub- 
 ject of much curious discussion, and with 
 good reason ; for it is not found anywhere 
 else except in the Lord's Prayer. It does 
 not occur in any other place in the New 
 Testament, and it is not used by any other 
 Greek writer. The meaning of it can only 
 be inferred from the etymology, and the in- 
 terpretation which seems to me most sat- 
 
TEE CONVENIENT FOOD. Ill 
 
 isfactory makes it equivalent to sufficient 
 or necessary. This meaning does not alter 
 the force of the petition as we always un- 
 derstood it. To say " Give us this day suf- 
 ficient bread " is precisely the same as to 
 say " Give us this day our daily bread." 
 The prayer is to be offered every day, and 
 it asks only for that which will suffice for 
 the day. The lesson that is thus conveyed 
 is one of moderation in our wants. We are 
 not to ask for abundance or superfluity, we 
 are to ask only for what we need. We are 
 not to pray for banks- or bins- or barns- 
 or cellars-full, but only for our daily bread. 
 You will notice that this is the only peti- 
 tion in the Lord's Prayer in which tempo- 
 ralities are mentioned, and our normal de- 
 sire concerning them, which is pnt into 
 words by our Lord, hath this extent, no 
 more. Just imagine the average American 
 trying to put his wishes for worldly good 
 into these simple words ! The things that 
 he craves, that he is striving after, that in 
 liis inmost soul he is praying for, — how 
 
112 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 vast and multiform are they when measured 
 by this humble petition ! What he would 
 say if he spoke his mind in his prayers 
 would be : " Give me this day my daily ten 
 per cent. ! " or " Give me this day a boom- 
 ing trade ! " or " Give me this day a chance 
 to make a thousand dollars!" With his 
 mind full of these vast schemes, of these 
 eager ambitions, imagine him kneeling in 
 his closet in the morning and taking upon 
 
 his lips this prayer : " Give us this day 
 
 our daily bread I " What a little thing 
 that is to ask for, compared with the things 
 that he wants and is working for ! To 
 what a sn?all scale this prayer is drawn ! 
 How can he bring his inflated speculations, 
 his racing ambitions, within the compass of 
 this simple prayer? 
 
 It will be hard for him to do it, no doubt ; 
 yet it will be well for him to try. To re- 
 mind himself thus, every day, of the plan 
 of life that God has for him — of the mod- 
 erate and frugal temper in which God means 
 that he shall abide — will be instructive, 
 
TEE CONVENIENT FOOD. 113 
 
 and may be salutary. If he thinks what this 
 petition means when he utters it, he will 
 not be in quite so much haste to get rich 
 when he rises from his knees ; he will come 
 a little nearer to understanding that a man's 
 life consisteth not in the abundance of the 
 things which he possesseth. 
 
 " But are we to take these words in 
 strict literalness ? " some one asks. " Does 
 this petition forbid forethought and thrift? 
 Must we desire nothing beyond the supply 
 of the actual wants of the present day ? Is 
 it wrong for us to lay by us in store some- 
 thing against the time of need ? " 
 
 No ; I do not think we can put quite so 
 much meaning as this into these words. I 
 do not suppose that our Lord meant to con- 
 tradict the counsel of the wise man, who 
 bids the sluggard learn of the ant a lesson 
 of providence. The virtue of thrift is in 
 many ways directly and indirectly enjoined 
 and commended in the Scriptures. 
 
 But the fact is that this prayer is very 
 short, and it is meant to express only the 
 
114 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 primary wants of men. There are otlier 
 things of value, but their value is second- 
 ary. Sufficient food to sustain life is a pri- 
 mary want; that is indispensable; some 
 store in the cellar or bank, something laid 
 by against a rainy day, — that is well ; we 
 may wish and work for that, and pray for 
 it too, I think ; but it is of secondary iin- 
 portance. It is not to be named among the 
 indispensable things. We will take it, if it 
 comes, and be thankful for it ; and pray for 
 wisdom to use it worthily ; if it does not 
 come, we can be content without it. 
 
 The petition, then, calls only for that 
 which is absolutely necessary, and teaches 
 us to school our cravings for material good 
 into soberness and moderation. 
 
 4. " Give us this day our daily bread." 
 It is given to us, and yet it is ours. We re- 
 ceive it from the great Giver as a benefac- 
 tion, yet we have a certain sort of propri- 
 etorship in it. How does it become ours ? 
 What is it that gives us the right to speak 
 
THE CONVENIENT FOOD. 115 
 
 of it as if it were a possession ? Is it ours 
 only when we appropriate it ? Is it ours 
 as the children's bread is theirs — provided 
 for us, and set before us, and only ours 
 when we partake of it ? No ; I think there 
 is a deeper meaning than this. God does 
 not, as a matter of fact, give us food in this 
 absolute way ; and I do not believe that he 
 wishes us to ask him to provide it for us in 
 this way. Our daily bread is to be ours, 
 we are to make it ours, in quite another 
 sense than that in which the infant makes 
 the food that is fed to him his own. Our 
 daily bread — the daily bread of all who are 
 able-bodied adult persons — is ours when 
 we have earned it ; when by our own labor 
 we have provided it for ourselves. If we 
 are children, too young to work, or if by 
 reason of sickness or age we are unable to 
 work, then we may thankfully take the 
 food that the love of others provides for us. 
 But it is well even for the children to re- 
 member that they can do something toward 
 helping to earn their daily food ; that the 
 
116 TEE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 little tasks and errands of the household 
 which they are competent to do take just 
 so much of burden from the shoulders of 
 the father and mother by whose labor they 
 live ; and that they cannot very consistently 
 offer this prayer unless they show them- 
 selves ready and willing at all times to do 
 these little services that are within their 
 powers. Their daily food will be somewhat 
 sweeter to them, I am sure, if they have 
 the consciousness that it is not wholly won 
 for them by the toil of their parents, but 
 that they have helped a little in earning it. 
 It is not good for children to feel that they 
 are tvliolly dependent ; the sentiment of 
 honorable self-support ought to be bred in 
 them from their earliest days. As they are 
 constantly sharers in the good that is gath- 
 ered for the household, so they ought to be 
 sharers, in some wise measure, in the labor 
 and care by which it is provided. 
 
 " Give us to-day our daily bread," means 
 then, and can only mean, when it is spoken 
 by healthy men and women, — " Give us a 
 
TEE CONVENIENT FOOD. 117 
 
 chance to earn our daily bread by some 
 kind of liouest work." We wish to eat our 
 own bread, not some one else's. Bread 
 that we beg is not ours; bread that we 
 take as lazy pensioners on some one else's 
 bounty is not ours ; bread that we steal is 
 not ours ; bread that we get from other 
 people by fraud and extortion and over- 
 reaching is not ours ; only the bread that 
 we have earned by honest work and fair 
 traffic is ours. " Give us this day our 
 daily bread." 
 
 Now just think what a revolution would 
 be wrought in our social and industrial 
 and commercial life, if everybody devoutly 
 offered that prayer and lived up to it every 
 day ! How many idle hands for which 
 Satan is all the while finding mischief 
 would be set to work. How much of greed 
 and fraud and craft and cruelty would at 
 once come to an end ! 
 
 Certain it is that there are large classes 
 in our civilized society who do not intend 
 to eat their own bread, and who do intend 
 
118 TEE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 to eat every day bread that belongs to 
 somebody else — bread that they have 
 either begged or stolen, or procured by 
 fraud or extortion. 
 
 There is first a considerable number of 
 grown-up boys and girls in our well-to-do 
 
 families who are out of school, who are in 
 absolute idleness, and who have made no 
 strenuous effort to find anything to do. 
 They do not wish to earn their daily bread. 
 They greatly prefer to subsist on that 
 which their parents have earned and saved 
 for them. 
 
 There is also another class of paupers, a 
 little lower down, who are not ashamed to 
 beg, and who mean to subsist upon the 
 gifts of the town almoner, or upon the ben- 
 efactions of the charitable This class has 
 been growing very fast of late in all our 
 larger towns and cities. 
 
 There is another class of people who 
 pretend to work, but who mean to do just 
 as little as they can; who never intend 
 to give a fair day's work for a fair day'a 
 
THE CONVENIENT FOOD. 119 
 
 wages if they can help it ; who will shirk 
 and slight and botch everything they do, 
 caring only to draw their pay when pay- 
 day comes, caring nothing at all for the 
 interest of those who employ them. Those 
 who employ labor have a sorry sense, some- 
 times, of the prevalence of this spirit among 
 those who work for hire. Such people can- 
 not honestly ask the Lord to give them 
 their daily bread ; it is not theirs that they 
 are trying to get, but their employers'. 
 
 All those people who get their living by 
 ministering to the vices of their fellow-men 
 belong in this category. The money that 
 is paid for vice is money that ought to be 
 paid for daily bread, for things useful and 
 necessary. Somebody needs it; somebody 
 suffers without it ; and he who takes it and 
 gives in exchange for it the means of vi- 
 cious indulgence is taking somebody else's 
 daily bread, and giving nothing for it so 
 good as a stone, — nothing better than a 
 scorpion. If he lives by such traffic as 
 this he never eats his own bread. Think 
 
120 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 of a man who keeps a tippling shop pray- 
 ing every morning, " Give us this day our 
 daily bread." It is not Ms daily bread that 
 he means to eat ; it is the bread that be- 
 longs to the haggard wife and the pale- 
 faced children of the man to whom he sells 
 the daily or the hourly dram. 
 
 All those persons who get their living 
 by gambling, whether it be in gold or 
 stocks, or wheat or corn, must be ranked 
 in the same class. Gambling is not a pro- 
 ductive occupation. It adds nothing what- 
 ever to the world's wealth ; it does noth- 
 ing whatsoever to facilitate exchanges ; its 
 whole effect is to unsettle values and keep 
 business feverish and dangerous. The men 
 who follow this nefarious avocation ren- 
 der the community no service at all ; the 
 world is not enriched materially or mental- 
 ly or morally by anything they do ; by no 
 stretch of charity can they be said to earn 
 anything. Yet there is an army of them, 
 and they get daily bread — many of them a 
 good deal more than that. It is not theirs 
 
THE CONVENIENT FOOD. 121 
 
 in any honest sense of the word ; it be- 
 longs rightfully to somebody else ; every 
 dollar that they gain makes somebody a 
 dollar poorer and nobody richer in any- 
 thing under the heaven. I should not wish, 
 then, to hear any man who gambles in se- 
 curities or in bread-stuffs saying " Give us 
 this day our daily bread," for I should 
 know that he did not mean what he said ; 
 that he meant to eat mine, or some other 
 man's, and not his own. 
 
 Then there is a class of greedy capital- 
 ists, proprietors of great companies, mana- 
 gers and stockholders of large corporations, 
 employers of labor, to whom this prayer 
 would be little better than blasphemy. 
 Understand, that I am not speaking of all 
 capitalists or organizers of labor, but only 
 of those who prove by their deeds that they 
 have no compassion on the poor ; that they 
 mean to make their eight or ten per cent, 
 even though to do it they are obliged to 
 cut the workman's wages down to a point 
 at which it is hard for him to get the daily 
 
122 TEE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 bread for his children. I know that some 
 companies and some employers are quick 
 to share with their laborers their increas- 
 ing profits, and slow to reduce wages even 
 when profits turn to losses ; but there are 
 others, I am sorry to say, who even in 
 times of prosperity crowd labor down to 
 the starvation point, heaping up their prof- 
 its by the impoverishment of the people 
 who do their work. And if I should hear 
 such a man saying this prayer I should 
 want to answer him : " My dear brother, 
 do you not know that God knows that you 
 are not speaking truth when you speak 
 these words ? Do you not know that you 
 are not content with your daily bread, with 
 what you have fairly gained, but that you 
 mean to rob these poor people who work 
 for you of a part of their daily bread ? Of 
 course you will not do it by meeting the 
 man in a dark lane, as he is returning from 
 his labors, and knocking him down and 
 taking his loaf out of his basket and run- 
 ning away with it; you will do it in strict 
 
THE CONVENIENT FOOD. 123 
 
 accordance with the laws of the state and 
 the law of supply and demand ; you will 
 simply take advantage of the crowded labor 
 market, and drive a sharp bargain with 
 workmen who are nigh to perishing." 
 
 It is not, then, for any of those who prey 
 upon their fellow-men — whether they do 
 it by the law or in defiance of the law — to 
 offer this petition. He who sincerely prays 
 that God would give him a chance to earn 
 his daily bread by honest labor prays at 
 the same time that other men may have an 
 equal chance. " Give us this day our daily 
 bread," the prayer is : not " Give me this 
 day my daily bread." And the spirit of 
 the petition not only rouses me to work for 
 my own livelihood ; it also forbids me in 
 any way to hinder or prevent my neighbors 
 from gaining their livelihood ; it forbids 
 me to eat my bread in idleness, in the sweat 
 of other men's faces, or by the debauching 
 of their lives. 
 
 5, There are some among us who may 
 
124 TEE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 seem to be absolved by their circumstances 
 from the duty of offering this prayer. Here 
 is a man whose larders are full, whose cel- 
 lars are crowded, whose barns are bursting 
 with gathered grain, whose bank account 
 shows a daily balance of many thousands, 
 — is it not a little superfluous for him to 
 say this prayer ? Can he ask without 
 stammering that the Lord will give him 
 this day his daily bread when he knows 
 that he has enough in his possession not 
 only for this day but for many days to 
 come? Should not those whose provisions 
 are so ample, whose accumulations are so 
 vast, skip this petition when they offer the 
 Lord's Prayer? Is it not something like 
 mockery for them to take these words upon 
 their lips ? 
 
 No ; I do not think so. Notice again 
 that it is not " Give me my daily bread," 
 nor is it " Give me and my household our 
 daily bread," it is "Give us this day our 
 daily bread." Who are included in these 
 plural pronouns ? How many are there of 
 
TEE CONVENIENT FOOD. 125 
 
 " ws " ? Just as many as are included in 
 the first word of the prayer. That " our," 
 we said, takes in all mankind. So do the 
 pronouns of this petition. You cannot 
 give them any narrower meaning. This 
 prayer throughout, in every one of its 
 phrases, identifies you with all humanity. 
 The man who wishes to pray only for him- 
 self and his immediate family and friends 
 must make his own prayer; the Lord's 
 Prayer will not serve his purpose. You 
 cannot intelligently use it and keep your 
 thought fixed upon your own individual 
 necessities, or on the needs of your own 
 household. He who thoughtfully takes 
 these words upon his lips takes at the 
 same time all human wants by sympathy 
 upon his own soul, and craves the outpour- 
 ing of the infinite bounty upon every needy 
 humau brother. 
 
 Kneel, then, O you who have much goods 
 laid up for many years, kneel in your clos- 
 ets and around your family altars and lift 
 ap to the heavenly Father this prayer. 
 
126 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 Think! when you utter it, not only of 
 those who surround your table, — think of 
 your neighbors too. Some of them are 
 toiling hard for small wages, and find it 
 not always easy to keep the wolf from the 
 door ; some of them, though willing to work, 
 stand idle in the market-place because no 
 man has hired them ; some of them are 
 sick and helpless and those who lean on 
 them are destitute; take them all into your 
 thought, fold the arms of human brother- 
 hood round them all, and then say, " Give 
 us this day our daily bread." Your neigh- 
 bors — they do not all live in the wards of 
 your city ; who are your neighbors? Every 
 human being is your neighbor. From other 
 lands beyond the sea sad tales of famine 
 come to your ears ; hunger and cold are 
 blanching the faces of little children ; while 
 you bow before the throne of the All-boun- 
 tiful these swarms of starving wretches will 
 come into your thought. Let them come 
 in ! Make room in your hearts for all of 
 them, and then say again, speaking for 
 
THE CONVENIENT FOOD. 127 
 
 them more than for yourself, " Give us this 
 day our daily bread." 
 
 I care not how vast your possessions, 
 how abundant your stores, this prayer is 
 for you. Humbly, thankfully, heartily ut- 
 ter it, and then say each one to himself, 
 " Is there nothing that I can do to help in 
 answering this prayer? Cannot I be God's 
 almoner to one or two of these needy and 
 famishing thousands ? Cannot / give this 
 day in Christ's name daily bread to some 
 who are perishing without it, or, better still, 
 can I not help some of them to find a way 
 of earning it for themselves ? " 
 
 I do not think, my friends, that I have 
 strained one word of this petition beyond 
 its natural and obvious sense in my inter- 
 pretation, and surely we have found a great 
 deal in it, far more than I ever thought 
 was in it before I began to study it. No 
 one can intelligently offer this petition 
 without learning from it, whenever he ut- 
 ters it, a lesson of humble dependence on 
 
128 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 God for daily mercies, — a lesson of fru- 
 gality, a lesson of self-support, a lesson of 
 equity, a lesson of charity. All that is in it 
 and coraes naturally out of it so soon as we ' 
 begin to think of what the words mean. It 
 is a prayer for rich men quite as much as 
 for poor men ; but it is a prayer that no 
 man can utter, without deceit and mock- 
 ery, who does not mean to do justly and 
 to love mercy, — that ought to blister the 
 ],ips of any man whose deeds show that he 
 is willing to live by begging or shirking or 
 cheating or stealing, or by preying on the 
 vices or the necessities of his fellow-men. 
 
 God helj) us all to live so that it shall 
 not be mockery to say, every day, — 
 " Give us this day our dally bread ! " 
 
VI. 
 THE FORGIVING GRACE. 
 
 And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. 
 
 Matt. vi. 12. 
 
 " There is one very simple lesson," says 
 Mr. Ruskin in his comment on this petition, 
 " needed especially by jDcople in circum- 
 stances of happy life, which I have never 
 heard fully enforced from the pulpit, and 
 ■which is usually the more lost sight of be- 
 cause the fine and inaccurate word ' tres- 
 passes ' is so often used instead of the sim- 
 ple and accurate one ' debts.' Among people 
 well-educated and happily circumstanced it 
 may easily chance that long periods of their 
 lives pass without any such conscious sin as 
 could, on any discovery or memory of it, 
 mtike them cry out in truth and in pain, 
 ' I have sinned against the Lord.' But 
 scarcely an holir of their happy days can 
 9 
 
130 TEE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 pass without leaving, "were their hearts 
 open, some evidence written there that 
 they have 'left undone the things that 
 they ought to have done,' and giving them 
 bitterer and heavier cause to cry, and cry 
 again, forever, in the pure words of the 
 Master's prayer, ' Forgive us our debts.' " 
 
 The word trespasses is used by the Mas- 
 ter himself a little later in this discourse, in 
 explaining this petition : " For if ye forgive 
 men their trespasses, your heavenly Father 
 will also forgive you. But if ye forgive not 
 men their trespasses, neither will your Fa- 
 ther forgive your trespasses." Yet, as Mr. 
 Ruskin says, the word debts is more ex- 
 act and more comprehensive than the word 
 trespasses. It includes both kinds of faults, 
 — the things done and the things left un- 
 done. The contrast is not quite so strong 
 between the two Greek words for which 
 these words stand ; but the English tres- 
 pass, on account of its use as a legal term, 
 conveys to most minds the notion of an 
 encroachment upon other people's rights ; 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 131 
 
 and one who asks to liave his trespasses 
 forgiven may think when he prays only of 
 such overt and injurious deeds as these. 
 But debts are duties owed to God and; 
 man, owed and not paid, — and those whoi 
 live the most quiet and inoffensive lives! 
 must find, if they stop to think about it, 
 such liabilities as these weighing heavily i 
 upon their consciences. 
 
 It is also well to recall a truth that ought 
 to be familiar, — that in Christ's own rep- 
 resentation of the judgment to come it is 
 these duties left undone, rather than any 
 crimes done, that furnish the ground of con- 
 demnation : " I was hungry, and ye gave 
 me no meat .... Inasmuch as ye did it 
 not." 
 
 It is our neglect, then, as well as our 
 transgression, our idleness as well as our 
 ■violence, our indifference as well as our ex- 
 tortion, our apathy as well as our excess, our 
 coolness as well as our hate and scorn, for 
 which we here pray to be forgiven. 
 
132 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 The key word of this petition is the little 
 word as. " Forgive us our debts as we for- 
 give our debtors." We ask not simply to 
 have our offenses and deficiencies forgiven ; 
 we ask to have them forgiven in a certain 
 way, according to a certain rule or standard. 
 In Luke's version of the prayer the phrase- 
 ology is different, but the meaning is the 
 same : " Forgive us our sins, for we also 
 forgive every one that is indebted to us." 
 The forgiveness that we ask for is compared 
 with and conditioned on the forgiveness 
 that we grant. We forgive those who have 
 wronged us, therefore forgive us. As we 
 forgive those who have wronged us, so for- 
 give us." 
 
 That may seem a hard and impracticable 
 rule, but that is the rule. Whenever you 
 offer the Lord's prayer you ask that the 
 hind of forgiveness you mete to others shall 
 be measured to you by the Father of mer- 
 cies. 
 
 Let us see how this rule will work in a 
 number of such cases as are occurring every 
 day. 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 133 
 
 " That man has wronged me," &^ys one, 
 " and I never can forgive liini. I have no 
 purposes of revenge ; I will let him alone 
 if he will keep out of my way; but the 
 wrong that he has done me is irreparable, 
 and it is useless to ask me to overlook it or 
 make light of it. I will not forgive him." 
 
 Well, my friend, that makes it a pretty 
 serious thing for you to say the Lord's 
 Prayer. " Forgive us our debts," you say, 
 " as we forgive our debtors." Forgive me 
 the wrong I have done, just as I forgive the 
 wrong this enemy of mine has done to me ; 
 which is, being interpreted by your unre- 
 lenting grudge, " Forgive me not at all ; 
 forgive me never." That is a fearful praj^er 
 to offer ; but it is exactly what the Lord's 
 Prayer means in the mouth of every man 
 whose heart holds an implacable resent- 
 ment. 
 
 "I can forgive my enemy," says an- 
 other, " I will always treat him well ; but 
 T never can forget the injury he has done 
 me. The recollection of that wrong ran- 
 
184 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 kles in my breast, and I could not forget it 
 if I should try." 
 
 This, then, is the spirit in which you ex- 
 pect your heavenly Father to deal with you. 
 You wish him simj^ly to let you off, to quash 
 the indictment against you and set you 
 free ; but you expect him to keep always in 
 ,mind the wrongs that you have done, and 
 never to think of you without thinking of 
 them. The sort of forgiveness which is ex- 
 pressed by the common saying, " I can for- 
 give, but I cannot forget," is not a very 
 liberal sort ; bitterness and wrath are mixed 
 with it ; do you want wrath and bitterness 
 mingled with God's forgiveness of you ? 
 That is what you ask for when, with this 
 spirit in your heart, you take this prayer 
 upon your lips. 
 
 " I am ready to forgive him," says an- 
 other, " when he is ready to be forgiven. It 
 will be soon enough for me to grant him 
 pardon when he asks for it." 
 
 But suppose that your heavenly Father 
 bad followed this rule in his treatment of 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 135 
 
 you, and of all mankind. Suppose that he, 
 upon his throne of holiness and justice, had 
 said : " It will be time enough for me to be 
 reconciled to these sinful and thankless 
 children of mine when thej^ seek to be rec- 
 onciled. When they repent of their trans- 
 gression and ingratitude and return to me 
 with contrite hearts, I will show my grace 
 to them and not before." If that had been 
 the divine purpose from the beginning, 
 where now would the race of men have 
 been, and what would have been the out- 
 look for you and me ? It was not the grace 
 that waits for contrition and confession, but 
 the grace that goes before them and pre- 
 pares the way for them, that saved sinners. 
 It was when we were enemies that we were 
 reconciled to God by the death of his Son. 
 The largest and best part of God's forgive- 
 ness is that which precedes man's repent- 
 ance. Do we mean to say to him, in our 
 prayers, that this antecedent and unsolic- 
 ited srace of his, which overcomes our en- 
 mity and wins our confidence, is superfluous 
 
136 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 and nugatory? Is this what our petition 
 means, " Give us always the mercy that 
 we ask for and no more." We are sinning 
 every day, and it is tlie goodness of God 
 that leads us to repentance. Do we wish, 
 in our prayers, to announce to God that we 
 will have none of this goodness ? That is 
 precisely what our prayers mean when we 
 say that we will grant our pardon only to 
 those who sue for it, and then pray, " For- 
 give us our debts as we forgive our debt- 
 ors." 
 
 It is plain that this announcement of a 
 common measure between the human and 
 the divine forgiveness, this declaration that 
 men can only ask for the kind of pardon 
 that they are ready to grant, is, in it- 
 self, a rather startling word from God to 
 men. 
 
 " The mercy I to others show, 
 That mercy show to me," 
 
 is the substance of this petition ; and none 
 but a good man can offer it without calling 
 down wrath upon his own head. I fear 
 
THE F.ORGIVING GRACE. 137 
 
 that tbere are not many of us who would 
 not be filled with fear, if we thought that 
 we were really going to be forgiven by our | 
 heavenly Father in just the same way that: 
 we have been in the habit of forgiving those 
 who have injured us. And if the forgive- 
 ness that we supplicate from him must be 
 the same as that which we extend to others, 
 it is hish time that we began to ask our- 
 selves what kind of forgiveness it is that 
 we ai-e wont to extend to others. We shall 
 discover, no doubt, that it is often a surly 
 and stingy sort of forgiveness ; and we shall 
 see that our method needs to be reformed 
 altogether. By what standard shall we re- 
 form it ? I know no better standard than 
 that which is exhibited in the gracious deal- 
 ings of God with his children. 
 
 For although, as I have said, we have no 
 right to ask God for a quality of mercy that 
 we are not ready to grant to others, yet 
 God, of his infinite grace, shows us mercy 
 far more full and free than we have a right 
 to ask for ; far more full and free than that 
 
138 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 which we show to others ; if he did not it 
 would go hard with us. Even with those 
 of us who are full of spites and gi-udges 
 he is patient and long-suffering ; it is his 
 abounding love that Avins us out of our en- 
 mities. We can learn, then, what must be 
 our temper, when we pray to be forgiven, 
 only by studying the acts and attributes of 
 him by whom we hope to be forgiven. 
 When we see how God forgives we shall 
 not only know how we ought to forgive 
 others, but also in what mind we must be 
 when we ask for his forgiveness. 
 
 This is no strange thing. We always 
 learn what to ask for in our prayers by 
 seeking to know what God has made ready 
 for us. That is always the very thing we 
 need. 
 
 If I could only succeed now in erasing 
 froin your minds all the analogies and fig- 
 ures that are borrowed from human govern- 
 ments to illustrate the divine government, 
 the task of making plain the truth respect- 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 109 
 
 ing the divine forgiveness would be greatly 
 simplified. The governmental terms which 
 are used in the Bible — sparingly there, 
 however — have been laid hold of by theo- 
 logians, and made to serve not only as the 
 form of all sound doctrine, but even as the 
 substance thereof. Everything that God 
 does is brought under some kind of govern- 
 mental act or operation ; the rules of polit- 
 ical expediency are supposed to explain all 
 his dealings with the children of men. The 
 maxims on which a human magistrate acts 
 are assumed to be the maxims on which 
 God acts ; what a human magistrate can 
 wisely do, God can do ; what a human 
 magistrate cannot wisely do, God cannot 
 do. It would be difficult to invent any sort 
 of contrivance that would more effectually 
 befog the whole subject. For the fact is 
 that the analogies of human government are 
 utterly inadequate to explain God's dealings 
 with men. The political rules on which the 
 wisest and best human magistrate must act 
 are wholly unlike those on which God acts : 
 
140 
 
 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 the canons of expediency that he must ob- 
 serve do not limit infinite wisdom and in- 
 finite power and infinite love. That a Be- 
 ing who is both omniscient and omnipotent 
 is shut up to the methods of human magis- 
 trates is altogether improbable. Our gov- 
 ernor could not pardon every criminal in 
 our prisons who professed to be penitent, 
 simply because our governor cannot tell 
 who is penitent and who is not ; every man 
 of them would profess at once to be deeply 
 contrite and radically reformed, and the 
 great majority of them would return, on be- 
 ing set free, to their old ways. But if our 
 governor could know absolutely (as he never 
 can) that a certain man in our jail was thor- 
 oughly reformed in heart and life, and that, 
 if he were released, he would always be a 
 useful, upright, honorable citizen, then it 
 would be the duty of our governor to par- 
 don that man and set him at liberty. The 
 law would not be honored by keeping any 
 such man in custody a single day, no matter 
 what his past life had been. The law is 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 141 
 
 intended to secure righteousness, nothing 
 else; it ought to be a minister of wrath 
 only to them that work unrighteousness ; it 
 should not, and if it is a perfect law it can- 
 not, keep any man in condemnation who is 
 now heartily, and who will henceforth be 
 loyally, on the side of righteousness. 
 
 The most important limitations of pardon 
 in the case of the human magistrate are, 
 therefore, those which arise out of his igno- 
 rance. He cannot pardon the truly peni- 
 tent, not because to do so would be any det- 
 riment to the state or any dishonor to the 
 law, but simply because he does not know 
 and cannot know who is truly penitent. 
 Our human administration of law is at best 
 but a clumsy and imperfect operation ; and 
 to argue from the methods to which it must 
 in its feebleness resort to the methods of 
 divine goYernment is the depth of absurd- 
 ity. 
 
 Suppose now you let go a little while of 
 these governmental analogies and take hold 
 of the thought which this prayer enforces, 
 
142 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 that God is our Father. Is it true that a 
 father cannot, without endangering the wel- 
 fare of the household, forgive an erring 
 child whom he has good reason to believe 
 to be truly penitent? Suppose one of my 
 children transgresses one of my commands. 
 I am in entire ignorance of the fact, and 
 there is no prospect of its being discovered, 
 but the conscience of the transgressor be- 
 gins to work ; he is sorry for his offense and 
 ashamed of it ; and by and by he comes to 
 me and tells me all about it and asks me to 
 forgive him. I have the very best reasons 
 for believing that he is sincere in this, and 
 that he will continue to be dutiful and obe- 
 dient in time to come. Do you say that if 
 I forgive this child without punishing him 
 I ^hall undermine the family government? 
 I say that I could in no other way so 
 weaken the family government as by refus- 
 ing to forgive him. I say that I could no 
 more deny one of mine who came to me in 
 this way than I could deny him food if he 
 needed it. What sort of family govern* 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 143 
 
 ment would that be wliicli would be under- 
 mined by the free forgiveness of a child 
 who showed that he was not merely afraid 
 of punishment, but heartily sorry for the 
 wrong that he had done, and honestly de- 
 termined to make all the amends for it in 
 his power? 
 
 If, then, we simply forbear to force all 
 our thoughts about God's dealings with us 
 into the forms of human jurisprudence, and 
 remember that the central and crowning 
 truth of our relation to him is that he is 
 our heavenly Father, we shall not feel that 
 we are obliged in our theories to limit his 
 power to forgive sinners who are truly con- 
 trite and obedient. Therejieyer^was a mo- 
 ment since the worlds were made when God 
 could not pardon any sinner who was heart- 
 ily sorry for his sin, and desirous of walking 
 in the ways of righteousness. To refuse 
 pardon to such an one would be to doom 
 him to continue in alienation from God. 
 By such a refusal God would become the 
 upholder and maintainer of sin. That he 
 can never be. 
 
144 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 I have been speaking, thus far, of only 
 one phase of the great fact of the divine 
 forgiveness, the lesser and lower part of it. 
 What I have been speaking of is simply the 
 release of the sinner from penalty — what 
 is technically called pardon or remission of 
 punishment. I have shown that God is 
 willing and able to pardon any sinner who 
 is truly penitent. And this, I suppose, is 
 about all that is commonly meant by the 
 divine forgiveness. But the divine forgive- 
 ness means a great deal more than this. 
 For, as we have seen already, the forgiving 
 love of God begins its work upon the sin- 
 ner while he is yet an enemy, long before 
 lie is ready to ask for pardon. When he 
 has come to this, that he is willing to ask 
 for pardon, that work is well-nigh done. It 
 is in the love of God, the free, unsolicited, 
 prevenient grace of God that compasses him 
 round and makes plain to him the peril of 
 his evil ways, and sounds in his ears the 
 offers of the divine compassion, and gently 
 constrains him to repent and return to obe- 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 145 
 
 dience and trust, — it is in this that we 
 see what the divine forgiveness is. There 
 is one New Testament word, translated 
 forgive, that means all this. It does not 
 signify simply to discharge an offender, to 
 release from a penalty ; it means to show 
 grace unto, to deal grace upon, another. It 
 suggests all that patient, loving work of 
 kindness and self-sacrifice, by which the one 
 who has been wronged seeks to gain the 
 love of the one who has wronged him, and 
 to reclaim him from his sins. The mean- 
 ing which we must put into the word for- 
 give when it represents this word is infi- 
 nitely larger than that which belongs to it 
 when it represents the other word, which 
 only signifies to remit a penalty. Here is 
 one of the texts in which we find the larger 
 word : " Be ye kind to one another, tender- 
 hearted, forgiving one another, even as God 
 in Christ hath forgiven you." 
 
 Here then is the field in which the divine 
 forgiveness begins its blessed work for men. 
 Far back of man's contrition this grace is 
 
 10 
 
146 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 manifested. Man is not forgiven because 
 he repents ; be repents because he is for- 
 ■ given. It is the goodness of God that leads 
 him to repentance. What kind of good- 
 ness ? God's providential favors merely ? 
 No ; but the suffering and reconciling love 
 of God in Christ. 
 
 " For we ourselves also," says the great 
 apostle, " were sometimes foolish, disobedi- 
 ent, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleas- 
 ures, living in malice and envy, hateful and 
 hating one another. But after that the 
 kindness and love of God our Saviour ap- 
 peared, not by works of righteousness which 
 we have done, but according to his mercy 
 he saved us, by the washing of regeneration 
 and renewing of the Holy Ghost which he 
 shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ 
 our Saviour." 
 
 " And you," he says in another place, 
 " that were sometime alienated and enemies 
 in your mind by wicked works, yet now 
 hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh 
 through death, to present you holy and un- 
 blamable and unreprovable in his sight." 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 147 
 
 Such, then, is God's metliocl of forgiveness. 
 To those who are alienated from him and 
 enemies in their minds, to those who are 
 hateful and suspicious and scornful, he 
 draws near, and, without forcing his love 
 upon them, he lays loving siege to them, 
 and by all the gentle ministries of his spirit, 
 and all the marvelous tokens of his dying 
 love in Jesus Christ our Lord, seeks to sub- 
 due their enmity and to reconcile them unto 
 himself. He not only has a pardon waiting i 
 for every sinner who will accept it, but hei 
 is doing continually all that he can do, with-j 
 out breaking down the man's freedom, to 
 change his stubborn mind and his rebellious 
 heart, and make him willing to ask for the 
 pardon that is waiting for him. This is 
 God's way of forgiving. 
 
 And this, ray friends, is the way that we 
 want him to forgive us. We do not de- 
 serve all this love but we need it, and we 
 cannot do without it. If it were not for 
 this infinite compassion, this abounduig 
 grace, there would be small hope for us. 
 
148 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 If God were only compassionate and kind 
 to us when we were obedient and dutiful to 
 him it would go hard with us. The only 
 . foundation of our hope is in the fact that 
 he remembers us even when we forget him ; 
 that he is faithful to us when we are un- 
 faithful to him ; that he is patient with us 
 when we sorely provoke him ; that he fol- 
 lows after us when we go astray from him. 
 This is the only grace that is sufficient for 
 us ; and surely it is nothing less than this 
 abounding grace that we ask for when we 
 pray to him. 
 
 Well, then, if we ask for it, we must be 
 ready to extend it to others. 
 
 God's forgiveness includes self-sacrificing 
 love, a giving of himself for sinners. If we 
 are to be the children of our Father in 
 heaven, if we are worthily to offer this 
 prayer which Christ has taught us, we must 
 be ready to give ourselves for those who 
 have injured us. 
 
 Is this a hard saying ? No harder than 
 any other requirement of the perfect law of 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 149 
 
 love. It is the steady and uniform teach- 
 ing of the New Testament. No doctrhie 
 ever fell from the lips of Christ or his apos- 
 tles that conflicted with this prayer. It is, 
 indeed, one of the rudiments of Christian 
 morality. Alas, that there are so many 
 Christians who have not begun to learn it ! 
 Yet I think we are getting on a little in 
 our understanding of this virtue. Lord 
 Herbert of Cherbury, a brother of the poet 
 George Herbert, and an English nobleman 
 of the seventeenth century, has a passage 
 in his autobiography bearing upon this 
 matter. " I am confident," he says, " that 
 in the forgiveness of injuries no man of my 
 time hath exceeded me ; for though when- 
 soever my honor hath been engaged no man 
 hath been more forward to hazard his life, 
 yet when with my honor I could forgive, 
 I never used revenge, as leaving it always 
 to God, who, the less I punish mine enemies, 
 will inflict so much the more punishment on 
 them." That is surely not a very Christian 
 reason for forgiving one's foes. Other rea- 
 
150 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 sons that he gives are also curious : " When 
 a man wants and comes short of an entire 
 and accomplished virtue, our defects may 
 be supplied this way, since the forgiving of 
 evil deeds in others amounteth to virtue in 
 us ; that therefore it may not unaptly be 
 called the paying our debts with another 
 man's money." The notion seems to be 
 that forgiveness is a work of supereroga- 
 tion, and that it helps to balance the ac- 
 count of our sins. He comes a little nearer 
 to a just view when he says, "That he that 
 cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over 
 which he must pass himself ; for every man 
 has need to be forgiven." We will trust 
 that Lord Herbert's frank judgment that 
 no man of his time had exceeded him in 
 forgiveness was somewhat too favorable to 
 himself ; certainly we will hope that a good 
 many in our time have somewhat clearer 
 notions about it. 
 
 Yet I am afraid that there are few in 
 these days, even of those who have long 
 been members of the Church of Christ, to 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 151 
 
 whom Christ's clear command, " Love your 
 enemies ; do good to them that hate you and 
 pray for them that despitefuUy use you and 
 persecute you," does not seem rather a vis- 
 ionary and doubtful maxim. But there is 
 no commandment of his that is more nearly 
 universal in its obligation, none that is to 
 be more literally and exactly obeyed, none 
 that reaches more directly the foundations 
 of Christian character, none that is more 
 evidently intended for every-day use. It 
 is not only the few Christians of excep- 
 tional piety who are to love their enemies ; 
 it is one of the very first things expected of 
 every disciple of Jesus Christ. 
 
 That word of Christ's about " gaining " 
 a brother who has trespassed against you 
 is a luminous word. That is the very thing 
 to do. If his spirit is bad, if he is full of 
 envy and malice, if the wrong that he has 
 done you was cruel and unprovoked, these 
 are the very reasons why you should con- 
 quer his hate by your kindness, thus losing 
 a foe and gaining a brother. And a brother 
 
152 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 is worth gaining. Of all the gains we make 
 none are so precious as those of friendship. 
 To have secured one more wise and loyal 
 friend is to have greatly enlarged your rev- 
 enues. And a friend won in this way, one 
 who has surrendered an unreasoning enmity 
 to your victorious love, can hardly fail to 
 be a friend forever. 
 
 Have you never gained with such weap- 
 ons such a victory as this ? Is there not 
 one among your friends who was once your 
 foe? And did you not find in the self- 
 denials by which you gained him an exceed- 
 ing great reward ? 
 
 Some of you think that this is an enter- 
 prise that requires for the prosecution of it 
 more grace than you possess. Do not think 
 so poorly of yourself. Surely, if you have 
 ever begun to learn of Jesus Christ, you can 
 feel something of the strength of the mo- 
 tives that urge us to this service. 
 
 You find it hard to enter upon such pa- 
 tient and self-denying efforts to win the 
 love of your enemies. You do not wish 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 153 
 
 them any harm, yon say ; if you ever had 
 purposes of revenge you have long ago dis- 
 missed these from your thought ; you will 
 even treat them courteously when you meet 
 them ; but to love them, to undertake in 
 any way to show affection for them and to 
 seek to change their enmity to love, — this 
 you are not able to do. But consider, my 
 friends. You say you do not wish tliese 
 enemies of yours any harm; can you not 
 go a little farther than that ? Can you not 
 truly say that you would shield them, if 
 it were in your power, from any harm 
 that threatened them ? That man who has 
 wronged you, — if you saw his house on 
 fire, and knew that he was asleep within, 
 would you not run and rouse him ? You 
 know that yoft would. You are not so base 
 that you could stand by and see one who 
 had injured you suffering and not interpose 
 to save him if you had the power. You 
 would despise yourself if you should permit 
 even your just resentment against wrong to 
 make you inhuman. 
 
154 TTIE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 Now if you would take pains, and ex- 
 pose yourself to danger and loss, in order 
 to save your enemy from death or phys- 
 ical damage (and any of you would do 
 that, I am sure), why should you not be 
 equally quick to save him from moral in- 
 jury ? Is not the evil that kills the soul 
 worse than the evil that kills the body? 
 Are not the wounds that a man suffei-s in 
 his immortal part more grievous and fatal 
 than those which he suffers in his mortal 
 part ? and if so, why should you not be at 
 least as prompt to shield him from one as 
 from the other ? You own that it would 
 be inhuman to let your enemy be roasted 
 alive in a burning building if you had tlie 
 power to rescue him; is it not equally in- 
 human to permit his better nature to be 
 consumed in the tormenting flame of a ran- 
 corous and reasonless malignity, when you 
 have the power to rescue him from that ? 
 
 For you must not forget that this enemy 
 of yours is hurting himself, sorely, bitterly, 
 ?t^hensoever he does you wrong. He hurts 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 155 
 
 you, it may be ; but the harm he does him- 
 self is ten times greater than the harm he 
 does you. When he telS a lie about you, 
 the lie may injure your reputation some- 
 what ; but how much more deadly is the in- 
 jury that it inflicts on the soul of the man 
 who tells it ! He smites you in the face, 
 wantonly and without provocation ; but 
 how much worse is the wound that the re- 
 action of that rage inflicts upon his char- 
 acter ! He must either hate and despise 
 himself whenever he thinks of it, or else, 
 nursing his blind passion, he must be pre- 
 paring himself for darker moods and dead- 
 lier deeds. 
 
 Now, think of the harm that these ene- 
 mies of yours are suffering as well as of the 
 harm that they are doing. Can you not, as 
 one who loves his kind, who is not pleased 
 to see any human being hurt or maimed in 
 any part of his life, — can you not at least 
 pity these enemies of yours, feel for them 
 a pity which has in it no mixture of con- 
 tempt, but is a real and sincere compassion ? 
 
156 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 Are you so utterly egoistic in your emotions 
 that your whole thought is fixed upon the 
 injury that you have suffered in your deal- 
 ings with them, so that you have no regrets 
 left for them though they are suffering so 
 much greater injury ? No ; I will not think 
 so badly as that of any of you. If you 
 have never found in your heart any com- 
 passion for your foes, it has simply been 
 because you have never reflected upon the 
 real state of the case ; because you have 
 never taken pains to put yourselves in their 
 places and to realize to yourselves the ter- 
 rible loss and detriment that they must be 
 enduring. I know that when you think of 
 it you cannot help being sorry for them, 
 and that you will be glad to do what you 
 can to save them from the destruction they 
 are bringing upon themselves. 
 
 You will need, though, when you set 
 forth on this enterprise, to be very prudent. 
 If any man ought be wise as a serpent 
 and harmless as a dove, it is the man who 
 undertakes to gain his adversary. The 
 
TEE FORGIVING GRACE. 157 
 
 more unjust and unreasonable he has been 
 in his treatment of you, the harder it will 
 be to win him. " We hate those whom 
 we have injured," the Latin proverb says. 
 The worse your enemy has wronged you, 
 then, the worse he will hate you. He can- 
 not help being angry with himself on ac- 
 count of the injustice he has done you, 
 and this anger he will vent upon you also. 
 There is nothing so illogical as ugliness. 
 It is such a man as this, perhaps, that you 
 have to win out of his enmities. It will 
 not be an easy task. No officious peace- 
 making will do. If you should send him 
 word, or tell him, that you had forgiven 
 him and were going to do him all the good 
 in your power, you would only make him 
 all the angrier. Perhaps it will only be by 
 stealth that you can serve him at first. 
 You will need about as much ingenuity and 
 tact and patience as would be required in 
 taming a wild-horse or in tunneling a 
 mountain. But, my friend, you can do it. 
 By prayer and perseverance, by the aid of 
 
158 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 tlie wisdom that is given without upbraid- 
 ing to every one that wants it, and the love 
 that is shed abroad in the heart through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord, you can conquer this 
 hate, and make your enemy your friend. 
 Did any better fight than this ever sum- 
 mon you to a worthier victory ? 
 
 But perhaps you say to yourself: "The 
 case is not, after all, so clear as the preacher 
 is making it. I cannot conceal from myself 
 the fact that this enemy of mine has 
 grievously wronged me. This wrong has 
 awakened in my heart a feeling of resent- 
 ment. It is not altogether a selfish feel- 
 ing. The indignation that stirs in me is, 
 at least in part, a righteous indignation. I 
 think that I do well to be angry when 
 such wrongs are done, no matter who may 
 suffer them." 
 
 Well, my friend, I allow that there is 
 some force in what you say. I do not as- 
 sert that these resentments of yours are al- 
 together sinful. I believe that they are 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 159 
 
 natural — would be natural to an unfallen 
 and perfect human nature. But, after all, 
 I do not think that these indignations ought 
 to rule our conduct. They may speak, 
 they will speak, but there is another voice 
 that ought to be more commanding, and 
 that is the voice of love. There is the 
 man ; he has been your enemy, but he is 
 your brother. He has injured you, but he 
 has injured himself more. If, in striking 
 you a blow that did you no permanent in- 
 jury, he had fallen and crij)pled himself for 
 life, you would be magnanimous enough, I 
 am sure, not only to keep no grudge against 
 him but to seek to show him kindness. The 
 case that he is in is no better than that. 
 You may feel resentment toward him, but 
 your feeling of pity, your desire to do him 
 good, will be a stronger feeling. It is not 
 by resentments that the man is to be 
 won to better ways ; wrath and indignation 
 never changed any man's heart; it is kind- 
 ness alone that will win him, and this is the 
 work that God has given you to do. Every 
 
160 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 such unreasoning enmity displayed against 
 you by any human being is a call to self- 
 denying work in behalf of him who cher- 
 ishes it. If you have any such adversary, 
 you need not go about asking the Lord to 
 show you some Christian work to do. There 
 it is ! 
 
 It is quite possible, however, that these 
 natural resentments of yours, of which we 
 have been speaking, will need a little chas- 
 tening. Perhaps they will be so stern and 
 loud that you can hardly take upon yourself 
 any loving labor in behalf of your enemy. 
 If so, it may become necessary for you to 
 discipline them by some real self-denial. 
 The opportunity may come to you of mak- 
 ing a costly sacrifice for the man who has 
 wronged you. Do not miss that opportu- 
 nity. Not only may you thus subdue his 
 enmity, you will quench your own hot in- 
 dignations. You cannot keep on hating 
 anybody for whom you have voluntarily en- 
 dured hardships and made sacrifices. And 
 it is not at all probable that he will keep 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 161 
 
 on hating you. By giving yourself for him 
 you will gain your brother ; and in so doing 
 you will not only execute your own purpose 
 of forgiveness, you will also bring him into 
 the better mind in which he can receive 
 forgiveness. 
 
 And this takes us back to the central 
 thought of the petition we are studying, 
 that it is only when we are in this state of 
 mind towards those who have wronged us 
 that we can offer this prayer. We want 
 from God a full and free forgiveness, that 
 has mingled with it no grudges and no cool- 
 nesses ; a forgiveness that blots out our 
 transgressions, that takes away all our in- 
 iquity, and receives us graciously and loves 
 us freely ; and that mercy which we want 
 from him we must be ready to show to 
 others. We stultify ourselves by asking 
 our heavenly Father to extend to us a 
 measure of forgiveness that we are not will- 
 ing to extend to our brother. Such a 
 11 
 
162 TEE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 prayer is mockery, and we know that it is 
 when we offer it. 
 
 What is more, we cannot receive the 
 fullness of the divine forgiveness until we 
 are ready ourselves freely to forgive — even 
 to give ourselves for — those who have 
 wronged us. The trouble is not with the 
 phraseology of the prayer, but with the 
 facts of the case. 
 
 You say that the desert is a desert be- 
 cause no rain falls upon it ; but that is only 
 half the truth. No rain falls upon it be- 
 cause it is a desert. The heated air rush- 
 ing up from its arid surfaces disperses the 
 vapors that would descend in rain. Some 
 moisture there must be on the earth, else 
 there cannot be rain from heaven. So in 
 your heart this forgiving disposition must 
 be, else you cannot rejoice in the fullness of 
 God's forgiving grace. The pardon may 
 wait in the sky above you, but it cannot 
 descend to you until that mind is in you 
 which was also in Christ Jesus. 
 
 In more than one impressive lesson Christ 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 163 
 
 enforced this truth upon his disciples. The 
 parable of the unmerciful servant is one of 
 these ; and you do not forget that other 
 word of his in the Sermon on the Mount : 
 " If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and 
 there rememberest that thy brother hath 
 aught against thee, leave there thy gift be- 
 fore the altar ; first be reconciled to thy 
 brother, and then come and offer thy gift," 
 The fact that all acceptable prayer must 
 proceed from a forgiving spirit, that no 
 man can be reconciled to God who will not 
 be reconciled to his brother, is constantly 
 and strongly asserted. 
 
 You have seen more than once clear illus- 
 trations of this truth in the lives of disci- 
 ples. You have seen enmities and jealousies 
 and grudges growing up between neigh- 
 bors and brethren in the church ; and in 
 QY&xy such case you have noticed that the 
 spiritual life of these quarreling Christians 
 grew feeble and fruitless ; that there was 
 no fervor in their prayers, no joy in their 
 praises, no sign of heavenly influence in all 
 
164 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 their lioly convocations. And then you 
 have seen a better mind take possession of 
 them ; mutual confessions and reconcilia- 
 tions followed; those who had been long 
 estranged came together and forgave each 
 other, and renewed the old bonds of charity 
 and brotherhood. And then, how quickly, 
 to the assemblies so long frigid and forlorn, 
 the warmth of holy love and the conscious- 
 ness of the divine presence returned ; how 
 the pulse of the church was quickened, and 
 the new life from above issued in abundant 
 fruits ! Every great religious awakening is 
 preceded by such works of reconciliation ; 
 and no wise servant of Christ expects any 
 real spiritual growth or progress among 
 those who are divided by. petty feuds and 
 contentions. It is not till we are ready 
 to forgive that we find any profit in our 
 prayers. 
 
 It is pleasant to testify that there are no 
 unseemly and scandalous strifes among those 
 to whom these words are spoken. Yet there 
 are few of us, I fear, who cannot think of 
 
THE FORGIVING GRACE. 165 
 
 individuals with whom we have had some 
 little dispute or disagreement, toward whom 
 we are cherishing a feeling of dislike if not 
 of enmity. And it may be that in the 
 hearts of some of us there are bitter and an- 
 gry feelings toward those who have wronged 
 us, or with whom we have been at variance. 
 Is it not a good time now to resolve that 
 by the grace of God we will conquer these 
 resentments, and compose these difficulties, 
 be they small or great ; that we will not 
 harbor in our hearts an unkind feeling to- 
 ward any man ; and that we will not give 
 over till we have won the love of those who 
 most bitterly hate us ? There is no com- 
 fort in these grudges ; they mar all our 
 pleasures and spoil all our peace. There is 
 no good in hating or in being hated. It is 
 no credit to any man to hang on to his re- 
 sentments. Some people fear that they will 
 demean themselves by showing a forgiving 
 spirit, but it is a gaunt and ill-favored sort 
 of dignity that lives on piques. You would 
 better let it starve to death. There is no 
 
166 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 manlier endeavor, no enterprise more chiv- 
 alric, than the conquering of a foe by lov- 
 ing him out of his enmity. 
 
 It is only thus that you can be the chil- 
 dren of your Father in heaven, who maketh 
 his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, 
 and "who sendeth his rain on the just and 
 on the unjust. And it is only when this 
 mind is in you that you can bow before his 
 throne and say, — 
 
 "FOKGIVE us OUR DEBTS AS WE FOR- 
 GIVE OUE DEBTOES." 
 
VII. 
 
 THE GKEAT SALVATION. 
 
 And lead us not into temptation, out deliver us fi'om evil. 
 
 Matt. vi. 13. 
 
 " SuPEEFLTJOUS and absurd ! " cries the 
 critic. " Why should I make any such re- 
 quest as this ? You tell me that God is the 
 infinite Goodness. Surely I cannot believe 
 in any God to whom righteousness in his 
 creatures as well as in himself is not the 
 supreme concern. Now I am bidden to be- 
 seech this Being of infinite holiness not to 
 lead me into temptation, not to place me in 
 circumstances where my virtue will be se- 
 duced and overcome. It is impossible that 
 he should do anything of the kind. What 
 says the apostle : ' God cannot be tempted 
 of evil, neither tempteth he any man.' If 
 he does not tempt us himself, is it likely 
 that he will lead us into places where evil 
 
168 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 spirits of men or angels will tempt us ? It 
 is absurd to suppose that he will, and it 
 seems like insulting his goodness to ask 
 him not to do it." 
 
 This objection seems rational, and if the 
 word temptation in the text always meant 
 what the objector supposes it to mean, it 
 would be much more difficult to answer. 
 But the word in this place has quite an- 
 other meaning. The verb from which it is 
 derived signifies to test, as well as to tempt. 
 It sometimes signifies to assail one's virtue 
 by deceit and seduction, with the intent and 
 purpose of overcoming it ; it sometimes sig- 
 nifies to prove one's knowledge by exami- 
 nation, or to test one's character by whole- 
 some discipline, with a benevolent rather 
 than a malign purpose. 
 
 Let me give you some instances in which 
 the word is used in this latter sense. When 
 Jesus saw the five thousand men gathered 
 about him on the further shore of the sea 
 of Galilee, he said unto Philip: "Whence 
 shall we buy bread that these may eat ? 
 
THE GREAT SALVATION. 169 
 
 And this he said to prove him, for be 
 himself knew what he would do." The 
 word " prove " in this place is the word 
 often rendered " tempt." " Examine your- 
 selves," says the apostle, " whether ye be 
 in the faith." The word " examine" in this 
 text is the very same word. " I know thy 
 works," says the Lord to the church at 
 Ephesus, " and thy labor and thy patience, 
 and how thou canst not bear them which 
 are evil, and hast tried them which say they 
 are apostles and are not, and hast found 
 them liars." The word tried, in this text, 
 is the same word. 
 
 This, indeed, is the primary meaning of 
 the word. It signifies to try, to put to the 
 test. And you may put a thing or a per- 
 son to the test for a good purpose or a bad 
 purpose ; to put a character to the test for 
 the purpose of subverting it is what we 
 ordinarily mean by temptation ; to put a 
 character to the test for the purpose of 
 bringing out its latent powers, and con- 
 firming its virtue, is a method to which 
 
170 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 God does, no doubt, in his wisdom, some- 
 times resort. 
 
 It is true that the same experience may 
 be to one an improving test and to another 
 a hurtful temptation. From the same or- 
 deal one man will come forth invigorated 
 and elevated in purpose and thought, an- 
 other debauched and demoralized. The re- 
 sult of this trial depends on the man's own 
 moral fibre. And I suppose that God never 
 by his providence leads any man into the 
 presence of a trial which the man is not 
 strong enough to resist, or which he does 
 not give the man strength to resist. " God 
 is faithful, who will not suffer you to be 
 tempted above that you are able ; but will 
 with the temptation also make a way to 
 escape, that ye may be, able to bear it." 
 
 Any trial, then, may be a temptation to 
 one whose moral nature is sickly and whose 
 will is weak. Every pain may be a temp- 
 tation to one of small courage and fretful 
 temper, — a temptation to murmur and re- 
 pine. Every small loss, every slight disap- 
 
THE GREAT SALVATION. 171 
 
 pointment, every little discomfort, may be 
 a temptation to the peevisli spirit and the 
 feeble will, — a temptation to sm'liness and 
 gloom. Relatively to such natm-es as these 
 half of the inevitable events of life are 
 temptations ; yet most of us would be slow 
 to pronounce every change in the weather 
 and every mischance of daily life a temp- 
 tation. Some measure of hardship we ex- 
 pect to encounter in this world, and in 
 cheerfully bearing it or wisely ignoring it 
 we obtain a needful discipline. That God 
 does place us in the midst of such trials as 
 these and keep us among them we know 
 very well; it never occurs to us to accuse 
 him of tempting us by this measure of ex- 
 posure. And those to whom the inevitable 
 and ordinary trials of life, the little pains 
 and grievances and slights and losses, are 
 temptations, can never offer this prayer, 
 " Lead us not into temptation," without 
 meaning by it, " Take us out of this world 
 straightway ; take us immediately to heav- 
 en ! " For existence in this world is not, 
 
172 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 and will not be in our generation, exempt 
 from such trials as these. They are the 
 constant accompaniment of life. They are 
 inseparable from our environment. They 
 furnish every human being who is not a 
 moral imbecile with opportunities of im- 
 provement rather than occasions of sin. 
 And when we remember that God's grace 
 is vouchsafed to all who will receive it, to 
 enable them to profit by these providential 
 trials, we shall surely feel that it is a gross 
 use of language to speak of them as temp- 
 tations, and that the human being to whom 
 they are temptations is a faithless and pu- 
 sillanimous creature. To ask God to lead 
 us away from everything that tries our pa- 
 tience, that tests our endurance, that disci- 
 plines our faith and courage, is simply to 
 ask him to relieve us of the burden of ex- 
 istence. We do not pray for this. What 
 then do we mean when we pray " Lead us 
 not into trial ? " 
 
 We mean, to begin with, that while the 
 ordinary providential discipline through 
 
THE GREAT SALVATION. 173 
 
 which we are passing is welcomed b}^ us 
 as a means under God's hand of growth in 
 virtue, yet that there are sore trials that 
 we shrink from enduring, and into which 
 we beseech our heavenly Father that he 
 will not conduct us. We mean by it just 
 what Paul meant, when from suffering that 
 came to him in God's providence he be- 
 souo-ht the Lord thrice that he might be 
 relieved, and heard for answer, " My grace 
 is sufficient for thee ; for my strength is 
 made perfect in weakness." The suffering 
 was wisely ordered, no doubt ; and yet I 
 suppose that Paul did well to pray to be 
 delivered from it. Suffering is not a good 
 in itself ; it may sometimes be a means of 
 good, but in itself it is an evil. Every 
 perfect human being naturally wishes to 
 be delivered from suffering. He will pa- 
 tiently endure it if he must, if there are 
 ends of character to be gained by enduring 
 it, but it is natural and right to shrink 
 from it. Those who crave it as a good in 
 itself, who come to feel that suffering is 
 
1T4 TEE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 meritorious and praiseworthy, have im- 
 bibed a morbid and heathenish notion, as 
 unlike the Christian idea as any notion can 
 well be. 
 
 They who pray " Lead us not into trial " 
 are offering the very same prayer that our 
 Lord himself offered in Gethsemane : " If 
 it be possible let this cup pass from me ; 
 nevertheless, not as I will but as thou 
 wilt." It was the natural human shrink- 
 ing from extreme suffering that found ut- 
 terance in this petition. There was no 
 halting of the will before this ordeal ; the 
 " nevertheless " modifies the natural desire^ 
 and brings it into subjection to the judg- 
 ment and the will. Once before, standing 
 in the very shadow of the cross, our Lord 
 lifted up the same cry, "Now is my soul 
 troubled and what shall I say ? Father, 
 save me from this hour. But for this cause 
 came I unto this hour ! Father, glorify 
 thy name." 
 
 With these words of Christ in our mem- 
 ory, those of us who believe in him will 
 
TEE GREAT SALVATION. 175 
 
 have no diflSculty in believing that it is not 
 wrong for the holiest and most devoted 
 man to pray to be delivered from severe 
 trials. Trials there are that tax the en- 
 durance and the courage of the strongest 
 hearts ; it is not only no sin, it is but imi- 
 tation of the example of Christ Jesus our 
 Lord, to pray to be shielded from them. 
 Only we must always say what he saidi 
 " Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be 
 done." " Father, glorify thy name ! " 
 
 There are feeble and faithless spirits, as 
 we have seen, to whom the smallest troubles 
 are temptations ; to almost any of us a 
 great trial might be a temptation. Upon 
 the bravest of us a blow might fall that 
 would blot the brightness from our sky and 
 banish the gladness from our homes, — a 
 trouble so sore that we should be tempted 
 to doubt and complain, and rebel against 
 God. To every finite spirit there is a 
 breaking sti'ain. And it is right for us to 
 pray that God will mercifully save us from 
 these extremities of trial. 
 
176 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 Do you point me back to what I said a 
 little while ago, — that we know before- 
 hand that God will not lead us into any 
 straits from which he will not graciously 
 help us out ? True ; and that is precisely 
 what this prayer asserts, as I understand it. 
 The second phrase, of which we have not 
 yet spoken, must always be connected with 
 the first. Lead us not into trial, hut de- 
 liver us from evil. Is not that an exact 
 parallel of our Lord's own prayer already 
 quoted : " If it be possible let this cup pass 
 from me ; nevertheless, not my will but 
 thine be done ! " Lead us not into trial ; 
 but, if_trial m ust com e, kee p us from fall- 
 ing into doubt and sin. Let not our trials 
 prove temptations, but with the trials give 
 the grace to bear them, so that they shall 
 be ministers of good to us, and not of evil. 
 
 In this view of the petition, then, it is 
 a simple, natural expression of desire that 
 the Lord would mercifully lead us not into, 
 but away from, the furnace of afHictiou in 
 which souls are sometimes tried ; and a de- 
 
THE GREAT SALVATION. 177 
 
 vout recognition of the fact that if, in his 
 ■wisdom, such suffering must come to us, it 
 is in his grace alone that we can trust to 
 keep us from the evils of doubt and despair 
 and rebellion against God. 
 
 But the meaning of the petition must be 
 somewhat extended. Doubtless it includes 
 not only the endurance of suffering, but 
 also the resistance of moral evil; and it 
 asks not only that the Lord will spare us 
 great trials, but that he will also shield us 
 from the assaults of evil wills. 
 
 Much of our environment is not of God's 
 devising. Bad characters, bad associations, 
 bad influences, fill many of the paths that 
 open before our feet. Indeed, it is impossi- 
 ble wholly to avoid the evil. The child 
 that is most carefully watched, the youth 
 whose ways are most circumspect, the man 
 who keeps his soul most diligently, comes 
 into frequent contact with sin ; and the 
 truth which this prayer recognizes is that 
 this contact with the evil is not to be 
 
 12 
 
 /■ 
 
178 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 sought, but shunned. It recognizes the 
 fact that every man has his weaknesses and 
 limitations, and that it is safer for him to 
 be surrounded with good influences than 
 with evil influences ; that character grows 
 better in a congenial than in an uncon- 
 genial atmosphere. We must encounter 
 evil ; our daily duty will bring us often 
 face to face with it ; but some paths are 
 safer than others , som e asso c iations are less 
 hostile t o virtue than others ; and the 
 prayer is that God will le ad us into those 
 
 path s_where_tha_ d^'igPi' i'^ Ipasi- ; t.linf;^ sn ii\x 
 
 as it is consistentjwith duty, his ki nd provi - 
 dence will keep usjmt ^f^associat ions where 
 our virtue_will^ be assailed. To ask God 
 that he will not lead us into such exposures 
 is not to imply that he is likely to do this 
 and must be besought not to do it ; it 
 means, simply, lead us out of and away 
 from temptation. The petition contains 
 something like what the logicians call a 
 negative pregnant, in which the negation 
 of one thing implies the affirmation of the 
 opposite. 
 
THE GREAT SALVATION. 179 
 
 The petition implies that God will lead 
 us if we ask his guidance. 
 
 It also implies that if we will follow him 
 he will lead us into safe places and away 
 from the snares that are set for our feet. 
 
 It expresses our desire to be kept, so far 
 as we may be without neglecting duty, 
 from exposure to the allurements of vice 
 and sin ; to be surrounded with virtuous 
 rather than with vicious influences. 
 
 It confesses our faith that God will so 
 keep us if we put our trust in him. 
 
 The true Christian purpose and practice 
 is suggested by this prayer, and it is a 
 golden mean that lies between two ex- 
 tremes. 
 
 The one extreme is that of the religious 
 recluse, who, because of his fear that his 
 life may be tainted by the sins of the world , 
 withdraws hi mself wholly or mainly from 
 intercour se with his fellows . If he does 
 not retire into a monastery he turns his 
 home into a cloister, shuns society, and 
 
180 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 wraps bis robes closely about bim wben be 
 walks tbe crowded streets. We know tbat 
 tbis is not tbe Cbristian way of living, be- 
 cause it is not tbe way tbat Cbrist bimself 
 lived, and bis last prayer for bis disciples 
 was, "I pray not tbat tbou sbouldst take 
 ; tbem out of tbe world, but tbat tbou 
 sbouldst keep tbem from tbe evil." Wbat 
 be desired for tbem was, not tbat tbey 
 sbould be sbut out from all association witb 
 tbeir fellows, but tbat tbey sbould be kept 
 from being barmed in tbeir cbaracters by 
 Bucb associations. 
 
 Tbe metbod of bis kingdom is personal 
 contact and influence. It is by tbe friendly 
 association of tbe good witb tbe evil, by 
 tbe communication of ti'utb and love from 
 tbe good to tbe evil, tbat tbe evil are to 
 be saved, and tbe world redeemed. Tbe 
 leaven in tbe lives of bis disciples is to be 
 mingled witb tbe mass of tbe world's self- 
 isbness and sin until tbe wbole sball be 
 leavened. He wbo seeks entire seclusion 
 from society puts bimself, tberefore, wbolly 
 
THE GREAT SALVATION. 181 
 
 out of all relation to the work of God 
 in the world, and refuses to employ the 
 method that .God has chosen and conse- 
 crated. 
 
 But association with men for a benevo- 
 lent purpose is one thing, and an unre- 
 strained intercourse with the evil of the 
 world is quite another thing. Mr. Edward 
 Denison, a man of wealth and devoted 
 Christian character, made his home in one 
 of the worst districts of London, and spent 
 his life there in trying to lift up the fallen 
 and to befriend the friendless. By such a 
 life as this he showed himself not only a 
 saint but a Christian hero. If he had gone 
 into that neighborhood simply to find com- 
 panionship, casting himself into the filthy 
 currents of its bad society and drifting 
 with them, he would have speedily sunk 
 down among the dregs of humanity. 
 
 This, then, is the other extreme of which 
 I spoke — that of the reckless pleasure- 
 seeker who rushes into all kinds of associa- 
 tions, not with any purpose of reclaiming 
 
182 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 the vicious with whom he consorts, but 
 simply for the excitements of society. If a 
 man is on fire with a philanthropic purpose, 
 his contact with bad men may not harm 
 him ; but if he has no such consuming de- 
 sire to do men good, if his association with 
 men is only that of companionship, if he 
 does not know that the virtue in him is so 
 positive and vigorous that it will overpower 
 their vice, then he may well pray, " Lead 
 me not into temptation ! " 
 
 Exposure to these direct assaults of moral 
 evil is indeed far more to be dreaded and 
 far more diligently to be guarded against 
 than exposure to suffering. It is natural 
 and right, as we have seen, to ask the Lord 
 to spare us the bitter anguish of great 
 losses and sore trials, but there is deeper 
 and stronger reason why we should ask 
 him to shield us from the poisoned arrows 
 of vice and sin. There is far greater dan- 
 ger to our characters in the contact with 
 sin than in the endurance of suffering or 
 sorrow. 
 
THE GREAT SALVATION. 183 
 
 I wish that I could impress this truth 
 upon the minds of all the bo3^s and girls, of 
 all the young men and maidens, to whom, 
 in any way, these words may come. When 
 you offer the Lord's Prayer, as most of you 
 do, I trust, every day, do not forget to let 
 your desire rest firmly and fervently on this 
 petition. Ask the Lord to keep you away 
 from bad company ; from the society of 
 those who are vicious and corrupt and pro- 
 fane ; from association with those whose 
 minds are filthy and whose talk is vile ; from 
 all communion with evil minds, and, so far 
 as possible, from all knowledge of evil 
 things. People talk about seeing the world, 
 about getting their eyes opened, and all 
 that ; but do you see just as much of the 
 good of the world as you can, and just as 
 little of the evil. Get your eyes open as 
 wide as you can to behold the truth of nat- 
 ure and the beauty of the Lord, but shut 
 them tight upon visions of sin and shame. 
 I tell you, young people, that familiarity 
 with evil words and evil ways brings no 
 
184 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 gain to you, — nothing but loss and sorrow. 
 There is one kind of ignorance you need 
 never bhish for, — ignorance of the names, 
 or of the arts, of vice and crime. If your 
 too-knowing associates jeer at you for such 
 verdancy, thank God that you are not pro- 
 ficient in such knowledge. ' The less you 
 know of the things that you are ashamed 
 to speak of the better for you. If by any 
 possibility you have learned such things, 
 forget them as soon as you can. And al- 
 ways remember, that, except as you seek 
 to overcome evil with good, the safest way 
 is to shun the evil. 
 
 Remember, then, all of you, old and 
 young, that this petition we are now study- 
 ing is like all the rest in this respect, that 
 those who offer it have much to do them- 
 selves in answering it. " Faithful prayer," 
 says Mr. Ruskin, " implies always correla- 
 tive exertion; and no man can ask honestly 
 or hopefully to be delivered from temp- 
 tation, unless he has himself honestly and 
 firmly determined to do the best he can to 
 keep out of it." 
 
THE GREAT SALVATION. 185 
 
 We must not overlook the plural form of 
 this petitiou. It is uot only a personal re- 
 quest, it is an intercessory petition. " Lead 
 us not into temptation ; deliver us from 
 evil." Our thought takes in others besides 
 ourselves ; the shelter and deliverance that 
 we implore for ourselves we ask for all our 
 fellow-men. And surely if we ask the Lord 
 to keep our neighbors out of temptation, we 
 shall be careful how we ourselves do any- 
 thing to place temptation in their way ; we 
 shall do all that we wisely can to make the 
 surroundings of their lives belpful, "and not 
 corrupting, to their virtue. 
 
 Especially full of tender solicitude will 
 this petition be as it falls from the lips of 
 parents. Lead us, deliver us. The larger 
 desire that takes in all mankind is gathered 
 into a burning ray of intensest yearning as 
 it falls upon the group that kneels around 
 the family altar. Look, Father, upon these 
 before thee ; these whom our love encircles ; 
 those who in tlie thoughts of the night, and 
 
186 TEE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 in the labors of the day, are always with us ; 
 these with whose welfare all our lives are 
 bound up, — deliver these from the snares 
 of the spoiler ; shelter all of us from evil ! " 
 Alas, my friends, if we would make our 
 practices march a little more evenly with 
 our prayers ! God knows our hearts ; he 
 knows how deeply we desire that our chil- 
 dren should be kept from temptation ; and 
 yet I fear that he often sees us contradict- 
 ing our prayers by the plans we make for 
 them, or by our weak concessions to harmful 
 social tendencies. " In modern days," says 
 Mr. Ruskin, speaking bitterly, as is his 
 wont, yet with far too much reason in his 
 bitterness, — " in modern days the first aim 
 of all Christian parents is to place their 
 children in circumstances where the temp- 
 tations (which they are apt to call ' oppor- 
 tunities ') may be as great, and as many, as 
 possible ; where the sight and the promise 
 of ' all these things ' in Satan's gift may be 
 brilliantly near, and where the act of ' full- 
 ing down to worship me ' may be partly 
 
THE GREAT SALVATION. 187 
 
 concealed by the shelter, and partly excused 
 as involuntary by the pressure, of the con- 
 current crowd." 
 
 Let us heed this sharp rebuke, my 
 friends; and when we pray that our chil- 
 dren may not be led into temptation let us 
 do what we can to choose for them a place 
 to live and a manner of life in which they 
 shall be exposed to the least possible temp- 
 tation. Many a man prays at the family, 
 altar " Lead us not into temptation," and: 
 then rises from his knees, packs his mov-\ 
 ables and goes with all his family, where ) 
 Lot went, straight down to Sodom. 
 
 And yet it will not be possible for any 
 of us, young or old, wholly to avoid tempta- 
 tion. Absolute freedom from contact with 
 the evil is no more to be attained than 
 absolute immunity from pain and trouble. 
 Duty will take us often into the presence 
 of temptation ; deceitful and alluring forms 
 of vice will appeal to passions that strongly 
 respond and to wills that feebly resist. It 
 is not, then, entire exemption from evil in- 
 
188 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 fluence that we expect when we pray, but 
 only that so far as is possible without neg- 
 lect of duty, without withdrawing ourselves 
 from the service of God and humanity, we 
 may be kept from contact with the evil, 
 and that when we do encounter it we may 
 be strong to stand against it ; that we may 
 be delivered from its power and dominion. 
 Here, again, comes in that complementary 
 phrase without which this petition would 
 not be perfect : Lead us out of temptation ; 
 but, when we must confront it, deliver us 
 from the evil towards which the temptation 
 draws us. 
 
 A temptation resisted brings us moral 
 invigoration ; if, by the grace of God, we 
 overcome, we are strengthened in the con- 
 flict. Nevertheless, our faith and firmness 
 will get all the exercise they need in resist- 
 ing the temptations that we cannot avoid ; 
 it is only when we shield ourselves, so far 
 as we consistently can, from evil influences, 
 that we can honestly ask the Lord to de- 
 liver us from the evil that is inevitable. 
 
THE GREAT SALVATION. 189 
 
 But what is that word of the sturdy 
 James : " My brethren, count it all joy 
 when ye fall into divers temptations ! " 
 Does not that contradict this petition ? Oh, 
 no. The " falling into temptation " is not 
 the heedless or the wanton exposure to 
 temptation ; his words do not mean that. 
 When, in the course of your daily duty, 
 you find yourselves surrounded with divers 
 temptations, count it joy. Do not run tim- 
 idly away from duty because temptation is 
 there ; do not sit weakly down and deplore 
 the evil. Up and at it ! That temptation 
 is the bugle call to the good fight of faith. 
 •You were in the path of dut}'' when you 
 encountered this temptation ; whenever you 
 are in that path God is always with you ; 
 then he is with you now, and by his might 
 you shall overcome. Joy, the joy of the 
 warrioi', shall fill your soul as you gird 
 yourself for the battle when victory is sure. 
 
 " Blessed are ye when men shall perse- 
 cute you ! " says the Master. What then ? 
 Court persecution ? Seek martyrdom ? So 
 
190 THE LORD'S PRATER. 
 
 some have argued, but the logic is poor. 
 Hear another word of his that must be 
 coupled with it : " When they persecute 
 you in one city flee to another." You need 
 not go or stay anywhere on purpose to be 
 persecuted ; avoid it as far as you can with- 
 out being false or faithless ; but when it 
 comes to you in the paths of duty, then 
 know that the rugged way in which you 
 walk leads up the mount of the Beatitudes. 
 By the same rule deal with temptation. 
 Do not court it ; do not wantonly expose 
 yourself to it ; pray to be led away from it ; 
 but when it rises up in your way then meet 
 it and fight it like a man, with prayer and 
 thanks to God who giveth us the victory 
 through our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 When we utter this prayer, then, we can- 
 not help remembering that an absolute and 
 perfect answer to its request is not possible 
 for us in this world. To be shielded wholly 
 from trial, to be defended entirely from 
 temptation, — that cannot be in this world. 
 
THE GREAT SALVATION. 191 
 
 While we live here sorrow will abide with 
 us, and sin will compass us round about. 
 And yet I am sure that there will always 
 be in every Christian heart a wish that 
 this prayer might be answered in an abso- 
 lute sense, and a faith that it will be in 
 God's own time. To each of us whom God 
 is leading a day will come when we shall be 
 led out of and away from all trouble and 
 all temptation, when we shall be delivered 
 at once and forever from all the evil. And 
 although we will not ask for ourselves what 
 our Master would not ask for us, that we 
 may be taken out of the world, yet some- 
 times in the midst of our conflicts and our 
 cares the thoughts of that deliverance and 
 that rest are very sweet. 
 
 But not only in the land immortal do 
 we look to see the complete answering of 
 this prayer. For some of us when we 
 pray " Thy kingdom come ! " believe that 
 it is coming ; coming to this earth in the 
 fullness of the years ; coming with all its 
 
192 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 light and sweetness, — with all its purity 
 and peace. We believe that a day is coming 
 when the bounty of the earth will fill all 
 its homes with plenty; when work will be 
 every man's highest privilege, and prayer 
 the refreshment and inspiration of every 
 human spirit ; when pain shall have lost its 
 sting and the grave its terrors in the bright- 
 ness of the hope that shines through its 
 narrow portal ; when there shall be peace 
 on earth and good-will among men, and 
 none shall hurt or destroy in all God's holy 
 mountain. 
 
 May God forgive our faithlessness if our 
 
 lips ever stammer or our hearts ever falter 
 
 in lifting up this prayer ! We know that 
 
 the answer will come, is surely coming, — 
 
 " For thine IS the kingdom and the 
 
 POWER AND THE GLORY FOREVER ! " 
 
Princeton Theological Semmary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 01021 6077