oyy 
 
 -^ 
 
 BV 210 .G864 1898 
 
 Gore, Charles, 1853-1932. 
 
 Prayer and the Lord's Prayer 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
Prayer 
 
 and 
 
 The Lord's Prayer 
 
 By 
 
 Charles Gore, M.A., D.D. 
 
 Of the Community of the Resurrection 
 Canon of Westminster 
 
 London 
 Wells Gardner, Darton & Co. 
 
 Paternoster Buildings 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The following chapters are a reprint of papers pub- 
 lished in Commonwealth, mostly in 189G. They are 
 reprinted at the request, and under the management, 
 of one of the Editors of that magazine. The text of 
 the Lord's Prayer employed in them is that of the 
 Revised Version. 
 
 I should like to call the attention of those who 
 desire practical assistance in praying on the model of 
 the Lord's Prayer, to the blank outlines for prayer, 
 personal and intercessory, in the late Mr. Bellars' 
 Before the Throne. 
 
 C. G. 
 
 Lent, 1898. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 y l. THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER .... 1 
 
 ii. prayer in Christ's name . . . .11 
 
 III. WHAT MAY WE PRAY FOR? . . . .21 
 
 IV. OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN, HALLOWED 
 BE THY NAME ... AS IN HEAVEN SO ON 
 EARTH 30 
 
 V. THY KINGDOM COME ... AS IN HEAVEN SO ON 
 
 EARTH 39 
 
 VI. THY WILL BE DONE, AS IN HEAVEN SO ON EARTH 46 
 
 VII. GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD . . 56 
 
 VIII. FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS, AS WE ALSO HAVE FOR- 
 GIVEN OUR DEBTORS ... . . .65 
 
 IX. BRING US NOT INTO TEMPTATION, BUT DELIVER 
 
 US FROM THE EVIL ONE . . . .72 
 
 X. [FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM, THE POWER AND 
 
 THE GLORY, FOR EVER AND EVER. AMEN] . 78 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 Ube Efficacy of draper 
 
 If a man regards the thought of Christ and His 
 apostles as in any way representing spiritual truth, he 
 cannot but own that among the most powerful and rich 
 of human faculties is the faculty of prayer. It is not 
 necessary to quote passages from the New Testament 
 to prove this. But certainly if it be true that the 
 faculty of prayer to God is thus powerful and rich, it is 
 also sadly true that, in our modern world, the pains 
 bestowed upon it are not at all proportionate to its 
 value. Nor can it be said to be properly appreciated in 
 our ordinary estimate of things. We think of the men 
 and women of scientific intellect, of eloquence, of artistic 
 genius, of political and social activity, as being our 
 powerful men and women, rather than the diligent and 
 constant offerers of prayer. Truly from this point of 
 view 'the world knows nothing of its greatest men.' 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 And our Lord at least hints to us that so it would turn 
 out. He describes under a startling figure the effective- 
 ness of importunate prayer, and at the same time fore- 
 casts the strains it will involve on human faith. The 
 effect of importunate prayer upon God is compared to 
 the effect of the widow's importunity upon the unjust 
 judge. The conclusion is drawn. ' Shall not God 
 avenge his own elect, which cry to him day and night, 
 and he is long-suffering over them ? I say unto you, 
 that he will avenge them speedily. Howbeit, when 
 the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the 
 earth ? ' 1 
 
 I repeat the question and apply it. Does He find faith, 
 the faith which shows itself in systematic prayer for the 
 coming of His kingdom, now in our time, on our earth ? 
 If He does not, who can express the peril and the loss ? 
 Who can deny that we are ignoring one of the three 
 constant elements in normal human life ? 
 
 We look at human life broadly, in the long reaches 
 of history, and you observe it moving in three different 
 directions. It moves out toward nature to appropriate 
 its resources, and the history of this movement is the 
 history of civilization. It begins where the savage feeds 
 on berries, or hunts his prey, or scratches the surface of 
 the soil to throw in his seed ; and it advances to the 
 point of almost inconceivable power, skill, elaborateness, 
 
 1 St. Luke xviii. 1-8. 
 2 
 
The Efficacy of Prayer 
 
 and subtle balancing of forces, which characterizes our 
 modern industrial system. 
 
 Secondly, we watch man moving out to develop his 
 relations to his fellow-men. It is the history of society, 
 beginning with the tribe and the family, and reaching up 
 to the social organization of to-day, with its breadth of 
 range and intricacy of relationship. 
 
 Thirdly, we watch mankind moving out towards God. 
 The movement, looked at in the broad, is quite as 
 perceptible and as important as the other two move- 
 ments. It occupies, like the others, a large share of 
 human effort and attention. It passes through similar 
 stages. It has its rude beginnings in savage religions, 
 as men ■ ignorantly worship' or ■ seek after God, if 
 haply they may feel after him, and find him/ Like 
 civilization and society, it has taken many different 
 developments. But the aim of all these different 
 developments of religion, and of prayer, which is the 
 most characteristic act of religion, is realized in the 
 religion and the prayers of the Son of Man, and of that 
 great catholic brotherhood which in His name worships 
 the Father in Spirit and in truth. 
 
 We are the ' heirs of the ages ' in the matter of 
 prayer, no less than in the matters of civilization and 
 society. But the question is, whether our zeal is in 
 proportion to our knowledge. 
 
 _ I remember once, in the early summer of 1884, seeing 
 a sight in India which made a permanent impression on 
 
 3 
 
Prayer, and TJie Lord's Prayer 
 
 my mind. In the modern busy street in Calcutta, called 
 Bow Bazaar, in which the Oxford Mission House used 
 to stand, I saw by the side of the tram-line a man, stark 
 naked, with chains round feet and hands. He was lying 
 flat in the dust, measuring his length on the ground. 
 He rose as I was looking, advanced a few paces, and 
 standing upright, with his feet where his nose had 
 marked the dust, he prostrated himself again, and pro- 
 ceeded to go through the same motions. He was a fakir 
 or devotee of some sort, and I was assured that he was 
 going to travel in this manner all the hundreds of weary 
 miles which intervene between Calcutta and the sacred 
 city of Benares. My first feeling was, I fear, one of 
 disgust and contempt at the superstitious folly of the 
 man. But I hope it was soon overtaken and checked by 
 a consideration both worthier and with more of humility 
 in it — the consideration, I mean, that he, in his belated 
 ignorance of the character of God and of the way to 
 serve Him, was taking a great deal more pains about his 
 devotions than I was in the habit of doing with my 
 better knowledge. This is the question for us : Do we, 
 with our superior knowledge of God, take trouble about 
 our devotion to Him, or put real effort of will and heart 
 and head into it, at all proportionate to the true know- 
 ledge granted to us, at all proportionate to the amount 
 of effort we put into our businesses or our social duties 
 and pleasures ? Or is our life of business and our life 
 of pleasure organized and real, and our life of prayer 
 
 4 
 
The Efficacy of Prayer 
 
 limited to a rather perfunctory hour on Sundays and a 
 few of the sleepiest moments of our day ? 
 
 Undoubtedly, if we have the privilege of intercourse 
 with God, we must take pains to realize it. Undoubtedly, 
 if there is a life of prayer, it will not be experienced or 
 developed without real effort and system and thought 
 and perseverance. 
 
 But to justify us in taking pains about prayer, we 
 must believe in its efficacy. I cannot seriously train 
 myself to hold intercourse with God, or make request to 
 Him, unless I really believe both that God exists and 
 that He hears and grants the prayers of men. Now com- 
 paratively very few people doubt the existence of God, 
 but a great many people doubt whether He really hears 
 and answers human prayer, and accordingly, whether 
 it is worth while taking pains about prayer. 
 
 The difficulties most commonly experienced are per- 
 haps these — 
 
 1. It seems inconceivable to our 'common sense' 
 
 that God, the ruler of the vast universe, should have a 
 
 personal relation to each individual, such as the belief in 
 
 prayer requires — a personal relation implying a particular 
 
 care and a particular providence. Like the man whom 
 
 the son of Sirach reproves, we mutter, 'Who shall 
 
 remember me from on high ? I shall not be known 
 
 among so many people ; for what is my soul in a 
 
 boundless creation?' 1 And no doubt to conceive how 
 
 i Ecclus. xvi. 17 (R. V.). 
 5 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 the mind of God can attend to every one of the innumer- 
 able individuals who make up the universe of men (to 
 say nothing of other existences) is impossible to us : that 
 is, it is impossible to imagine it or form a picture of it 
 in our mind. But our imagination is very far indeed 
 from being the limit of our reason. There are many 
 facts forced upon us by the science of astronomy, or 
 physics, or chemistry, which we cannot imagine, but 
 which we are rationally compelled to believe. So it is 
 with regard to this difficulty. Our reason demands it, 
 though our imagination is baffled. For let us think. To 
 get to know anything better is to get to know it more 
 widely, but also more in detail. The school-master not 
 only knows boys, but knows his own class of boys better 
 than another because he knows them individually. The 
 great generals are distinguished like Napoleon for nothing 
 more than this — their combination of widest conceptions 
 and plans with attention to the smallest details. To 
 know well, therefore, is to know both broadly and in 
 detail. And to act well is to act with a wide grasp, and 
 also an insight into each individual case. So we must 
 grant that the absolute perfection of the knowledge and 
 action of God must mean that the universal range or 
 scope of the divine attributes, over all creatures what- 
 soever, diminishes nothing from their perfectly indi- 
 vidual application. God — our reason assures us, though 
 our imagination is baffled — must know each of us and 
 love each of us as if there were no other in the world to 
 
 6 
 
The Efficacy of Prayer 
 
 know and love, and deals with each of us with an 
 individual providence, in which His universal laws 
 or methods of action are not violated but expressed and 
 exemplified. That is the verdict of reason, and it is 
 also the assurance of Christ. ' The very hairs of your 
 head are all numbered.' 
 
 2. ' But, granted that God knows all we want, and 
 wills to give us what is best for us, what is the use of 
 praying ? ' To ask this question shows indeed a funda- 
 mental mistake as to the purpose of prayer. No doubt 
 it is the judgment of reason, as it is again the assurance 
 of our Lord, that our * Father knoweth the things we 
 have need of before we ask him,' and knows them a 
 great deal better than we do. The object of prayer is 
 not to inform God or to correct His methods — to drag 
 down His wisdom to the level of our folly : the object 
 of prayer is to educate us in intercourse with God. We 
 are sons of God, capable of something better than 
 mechanical obedience; capable of intelligent corre- 
 spondence with our Father, capable of fellowship and 
 communion with Him in one Spirit. There is to be 
 what the New Testament calls ' freedom of speech/ 1 
 and an open avenue of ' inquiry towards God.' 2 That 
 is our highest function ; and that is the glory of our 
 eternal occupation. To train us for it now, in the child- 
 
 1 The word translated ■ boldness ' in Eph. iii. 12 ; Heb. iv. 16 ; 
 1 John iii. 21, etc. 
 
 2 1 Pet. iii. 21 (R. V. margin). 
 
 7 
 
Prayer, and The Lords Prayer 
 
 hood of our immortal life, even though we babble with 
 half-inarticulate sounds, we are to be practised to pray. 
 We are to ask persistently and regularly, and according 
 to the loving wisdom of God, to receive in response to 
 our prayers, and so to be educated into personal relations 
 with God. 
 
 Who can deny that the end is worthy ? and who that 
 has ever taken pains about prayer, or ' got an answer/ 
 can deny that the method is wisely chosen ? 
 
 3. ' Ah ! this kind of argument was all very well 
 before it was known that the world was governed by 
 fixed laws ; but now that the universal reign of law is 
 recognized, we cannot believe that our prayer can have 
 power to alter it, or affect the course of nature as it 
 moves on in its inexorable order. 5 
 
 This is an objection which it is better to press a little 
 further ; and, as in many like cases, if we press it to its 
 consequences we may be enabled to see that it will not 
 hold. So far as it implies that we cannot hope to alter 
 the universal laws of nature, it is certainly valid. Any 
 prayer which is an attempt to alter the laws of God's 
 natural government, or to drag down His wisdom to the 
 level of our short-sightedness, must undoubtedly fail of 
 its purpose. We do know that the world is governed 
 by fixed laws, that is, that God's method in governing 
 the world is a method of universal law or order. But 
 because the world is governed by fixed laws, does it 
 follow that nothing is left to our action? That the 
 
 8 
 
The Efficacy of Prayer 
 
 laws work on without any possibility of fruitful effort or 
 co-operation on our part ? It is in accordance with fixed 
 laws that gold is extracted from the earth and turned 
 into coin. But will this happen unless we discover it 
 and extract it, and put it through all the processes of 
 manufacture? Needless to say it will not. Here we 
 touch the mystery of free will : namely, the fact that 
 within certain limits the way the world shall go depends 
 on our action or inaction. I make here no kind of 
 attempt to solve this mystery. I only insist that the 
 responsibility involved in our freedom is a practical 
 truth — that though the world is governed by fixed 
 laws, a vast deal of the utmost importance to us 
 depends on our co-operation and correspondence with 
 the system of nature. 
 
 As the great Francis Bacon taught the world, the 
 secret of power in nature is correspondence with its 
 laws. It was exactly the same lesson which Jesus 
 Christ taught the world in relation to prayer. Prayer 
 is fruitful, and is offered in ' spirit and in truth,' exactly 
 in proportion as it is not an attempt to fight against 
 the laws of God's good government, but an attempt to 
 correspond or co-operate with His purpose. Christian 
 prayer is one way of correspondence with God. And 
 there is — I say it with perfect confidence — no greater 
 difficulty in believing that God intends to give us whole 
 classes of good things for soul and body, but will not 
 give us them unless we correspond with His purpose by 
 
 9 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 diligent prayer, than in believing that whole classes of 
 good things are stored up for us in nature, which will 
 not be our own unless we seek them by diligent hard 
 work. There is no more difficulty to our intellects in 
 one kind of co-operation than in the other. 
 
 We accept the fact that if we want wealth we must 
 work for it, though we cannot explain how inexorable 
 laws leave room for human freedom. We can, with 
 exactly the same reasonableness, accept the fact as 
 practically true, that there are multitudes of things 
 which God means to give us, but will not give us unless 
 we pray for them. This fact of the efficacy of prayer 
 rests on common human experience, on the witness of 
 experts, that is, of especially spiritual men and women, 
 and, most of all, on the authority of the Son of Man. 
 
 But here we touch the question of the grounds for 
 praying, and of the difference between ignorant and 
 enlightened praying — the praying which is 'in the 
 name of Christ'; and we must leave the matter for 
 another paper. 
 
 10 
 
II 
 Eraser In Gbrfst's IRame 
 
 In my last paper I pointed out that prayer, in its 
 various forms, appears to be as truly a natural function 
 of human nature as the promotion of civilization or 
 of society; and this itself is a powerful argument for 
 the reality of the Object of prayer. We find the men 
 of science constantly reasoning in this manner. If 
 they see any organ or function in any plant or animal 
 strongly and constantly developed, they infer that there 
 must be something in nature, external to the plant or 
 animal, which renders this organ useful; for nothing, 
 they assure us, can become developed and maintain 
 itself, unless it is in real correspondence with some fact 
 or facts of the external world. To take only one 
 example, the eye is an organ which has developed and 
 become a constant part of animal organisms. It could 
 not have done this unless there was a reality called 
 light external to the animal, such as justified the 
 
 11 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 existence of the eye, and made it useful. We may 
 argue in exactly the same way. It would have been 
 impossible for man to appear constantly and persistently 
 in the attitude of prayer, and for this religious tendency 
 to take shape and become persistent, unless God, the 
 object of prayer, were a reality, and man by praying 
 was brought into real and profitable relation with 
 Him. 
 
 And the force of this argument is increased when we 
 observe how the prayers of mankind pass through many 
 stages, in which they seem to be ; feeling after ' their 
 object without truly ' finding ' Him, till at last, through 
 the teaching of the Son of Man, they appear to attain 
 for the first time to real correspondence with Him. 
 This, I say, increases the force of the argument, because 
 it is what we observe in the similar case of the investi- 
 gation of nature ; and in this respect we may compare, 
 as has been already suggested, the place of Jesus 
 Christ in the history of prayer with the place of Francis 
 Bacon in the history of science. There was investiga- 
 tion of nature before Bacon, for nature is inevitably 
 fascinating and alluring to the imagination of man, but 
 through fifteen centuries it had made no progress. 
 Why? Because it made no serious attempt to be in 
 correspondence with the reality. It was seeking to 
 impose men's arbitrary whims — the whims of the 
 astrologer and the alchemist — upon nature. It was 
 seeking short-cuts to universal knowledge — the philo- 
 
 12 
 
Prayer in CJwist's Name 
 
 sopher's stone, the elixir of life. It was arbitrary, 
 therefore it was unprogressive. Now Bacon made no 
 progress himself in the knowledge of nature ; but as a 
 sort of prophet he put into words the principles which 
 ought to guide men in their inquiries. ' Nature/ he 
 said, ' can only be controlled by being obeyed/ ' He 
 that will make progress must enter the kingdom of 
 nature a little child/ The reverent investigation of 
 nature as she is, and the power won by submissive 
 correspondence to her actual laws, these were to be 
 the watchwords of scientific progress. These, in fact, 
 have been the watchwords of that gigantic advance, 
 both in the knowledge and use of nature, which has 
 characterized the last three centuries. The reverent 
 investigation of what nature's laws in fact are, has 
 resulted in the forces of steam and electricity being at 
 the disposal of mankind. 
 
 Now, as in many other respects, so also in this — our 
 Lord differed from Bacon in that what He taught He 
 practised, and what He professed He realized. Still, 
 we may find in Bacon's teaching in regard to the know- 
 ledge of nature, a suggestive analogy to our Lord's 
 teaching in regard to the exercise of prayer. Prayer, 
 before Christ, had expressed the indomitable human 
 instinct which drove men to seek relations with God. 
 But it was ignorant asking. Christ, by His teaching 
 and by His atonement, first put the instinct into perfect 
 relation with its object; into perfect relation both of 
 
 13 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 knowledge and of power. He taught men the character 
 of God the Father. He taught them about human 
 nature, its capacity and destiny, the meaning of sin and 
 the remedies for it, the true use of physical pain, the 
 fruitfulness of sacrifice. He assured men of the final 
 victory of the divine kingdom, and pointed to the 
 Church as the society which is to represent that 
 kingdom in this world, and to prepare the way for the 
 kingdom which is to come. By all this body of teach- 
 ing He did not, indeed, satisfy human curiosity about 
 divine things, for He still left man largely under the 
 discipline of ignorance. Still, 'we know in part/ we 
 ' see through a glass darkly.' But He did put us into 
 a correspondence, which is adequate for practical 
 purposes, with the mind and character of God. Hence- 
 forth prayer can rise in real correspondence with known 
 truth, in the face of enemies whose nature and the 
 limitation of whose powers have been disclosed to us. 
 It can rise in accordance with the laws of the revealed 
 kingdom of God. In a word, prayer has become 
 intelligent correspondence with the manifested God, 
 the correspondence of sons with a Father. 
 
 14 
 
Prayer in Christ's Name 
 
 II 
 
 When you examine the utterances of Christ with 
 regard to prayer, you find that they consist of large 
 general promises, subsequently defined and made more 
 exact. 'Ask, and ye shall receive/ Here is a large 
 general promise. It arrests the attention by its obvious 
 contradiction to facts of experience. It stimulates 
 further inquiry, and further inquiry is met by exacter 
 statements. ' Therefore I say unto you, all things 
 whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye have 
 received them, and ye shall have them ' (St. Mark xi. 24). 
 Again, ' If ye abide in me, and. my words abide in you, 
 ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you ' 
 (St. John xv. 7). Once more, 'Verily, verily, I say 
 unto you, if ye shall ask anything of the Father, he 
 will give it you in my name. Hitherto have ye asked 
 nothing in my name. Ask, and ye shall receive, that 
 your joy may be fulfilled' (St. John xvi. 23, 24). 
 When we come to consider them, these further defini- 
 tions of the conditions of prayer are found to be in 
 close agreement. Thus it is morally impossible to 
 have a real confidence that the things we are asking 
 for shall be certainly received, unless our petitions are 
 grounded on some real knowledge of the mind and 
 method of God ; otherwise asking would be a mere 
 crying for the moon. Thus the first of these passages 
 
 15 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 is in correspondence with the second. The prayer 
 which secures its own answer is the prayer which is 
 determined by the mind of Christ, the prayer which 
 expresses not our own lawless and short-sighted wants, 
 but the will and purposes of Christ, who is the image 
 of God ; the will and purposes of Him whose victory 
 was the victory of complete self-surrender, and whose 
 triumph was the fruit of what in the eyes of men was 
 completest failure. And this is what our Lord means 
 by prayer in His name. It is a childish fancy that we 
 pray in Christ's name by adding the words 'through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord ' at the end of any petition we 
 like to offer. The name of God, the name of Christ, in 
 the New Testament expresses something much more 
 than certain syllables uttered by the voice. They 
 express the being of God as He has revealed Himself 
 in Christ. The ambassador who speaks in the name of 
 his country or his king, does so because he represents 
 not his own views, but the views of the power which 
 sent him. Thus, to pray in the name of Christ, is to 
 pray as one who represents Christ, whose mind is 
 Christ's mind, his point of view Christ's point of view, 
 his wishes Christ's wishes. With what force will now 
 come home to us those words of Christ, 'Hitherto, 
 have ye asked nothing in my name.' So many things 
 we have asked, but in our own name. Perhaps we 
 have not prayed for many years with any reality, and 
 then some calamity seems ready to fall on us. We 
 
 16 
 
Prayer in Christ's Name 
 
 fling ourselves on our knees, and pray, ' Oh, my Father, 
 avert from me this blow which I so sorely dread/ or 
 1 Give me this boon which I so greatly desire/ There 
 is value in all serious approach to God; but this sort 
 of prayer, which is selfish, and is strictly from our own 
 point of view, is not prayer in Christ's name, though 
 it may end up with the accustomed formula, ' through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord.' Nor, if our friend or child is 
 sick unto death, and we pray with tears for the sparing 
 of his life, is such prayer prayer in Christ's name, unless 
 we have really risen to take His view of sickness and 
 suffering and death. Now we see that prayer in the 
 name of Christ is something which can only arise out 
 of a will and heart redeemed by Christ, and brought by 
 Him into union with God. It is the prayer of moral 
 correspondence ; it is the prayer of sons. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But here a number of questions arise. We may 
 fairly ask, what are the subjects of prayer in Christ's 
 name ? — what can we pray for, and what can we not, in 
 accordance with His will ? For instance, may we pray 
 for health, for fine weather, for physical as well as 
 spiritual blessings? To these questions in detail I 
 propose to attempt an answer in the next paper; but 
 
 17 c 
 
Prayer, and TJie Lord's Prayer 
 
 meanwhile I will point out, that our Lord did not 
 leave this matter in the region of abstract speculation. 
 He taught us by example. ' After this manner, there- 
 fore, pray ye.' The Lord's Prayer is not so much one 
 prayer among many, as the type and pattern of all 
 J Christian praying, and if we want to know whether 
 any prayer can be truly described as a prayer in 
 Christ's name, we had better ask ourselves whether it 
 can fall within the scope, and be expressed in the 
 language, of the Lord's Prayer. Indeed, the lessons 
 of prayer find in the words of that great example their 
 deepest expression. There is both the full realization 
 of the broad human instinct of approach to God, while 
 at the same time there is the sternest rebuke of the 
 selfishness and the narrowness which ordinarily mix 
 with it. The prayer of untaught human nature is, 
 'My Father, give me to-day what I so sorely want, 
 avert from me what I so utterly shrink from.' The 
 very order of the Lord's Prayer, apart from the mean- 
 ing in detail of its particular clauses, strikes the 
 broader, the diviner note. ' Our Father,' — the very 
 first words are the rebuke of selfishness. They force 
 us to place ourselves before the impartial God with 
 whom is no respect of persons, whose thoughts are 
 higher and purer and wider than our thoughts, as the 
 heaven is higher and purer and wider than the earth ; 
 but who yet is near to us with all the individualizing 
 love and care which belongs to His fatherhood. c Hal- 
 
 18 
 
Prayer in Christ's Name 
 
 lowed be thy name;' that is, let God's revelation of 
 Himself, His truth, His character, be held in honour. 
 That is the first petition. Probably there is no man, 
 however spiritual, who in the present age would have 
 put this petition first. The honour of God's truth is 
 so continually, in the modern mind, subordinate to 
 human needs. But in the Lord's Prayer we are first 
 forced to exalt into the place of supreme importance 
 the unchangeable honour of God Himself. 'Thy 
 kingdom come.' We are interested in our narrow 
 schemes and wants, but here we are forced to merge 
 our littleness in that great and divine purpose, which 
 through all the ages is slowly realizing itself. No self- 
 centred will or desire can hold its own here. ' Thy will 
 be done/ We are forced to bend our stubborn wills 
 and inclinations until they are brought into conformity 
 to that great will of God, to which all the hierarchies of 
 heaven find it their joy and glory to minister. Only 
 then, when we have exalted God's glory above man's 
 need, and merged our littleness into God's greatness, 
 and bent our wills to minister to God's will, only then 
 are we allowed to express our own wants for ourselves. 
 1 Give Us this day our daily bread,' and here again it 
 is us, not me; and 'daily bread,' that is, just that 
 provision which enables me to be fitted for my place 
 and work in the kingdom of God, not anything that • 
 I should like. And then, because we cannot do God's j 
 work unless we are in His favour, therefore, ' Forgive i 
 
 10 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 us our trespasses,' and that not anyhow, but according 
 to that law by which God deals with us as we deal with 
 our fellow-men, ' Forgive us our trespasses, as we for- 
 give them that trespass against us.' And then, because 
 we are frail, and Satan is powerful, 'Bring us not into 
 temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.' 
 
 We shall go on to consider somewhat of the rich 
 meaning which lies in these clauses in detail. For the 
 present let us only realize the depth of teaching which 
 lies in the very order of the clauses. Truly, a child 
 may pray that prayer, and the heart of childhood under- 
 stands it; but it takes the wisest saint to realize 
 anything of the fulness of its meaning. 
 
 In this great prayer, then, as much in its general 
 outline as in the particular meaning of the separate 
 clauses, lies the secret of the mind of Christ. In the 
 praying of it consists prayer in His name; and the 
 principle inherent in it is the principle of correspondence. 
 
 2C 
 
Ill 
 
 TKHbat mas we ipras for? 
 
 ' Prayer is pleasing to God, that is, the prayer which 
 is undertaken in the proper manner. He therefore 
 that desires to be heard should pray wisely, fervently, 
 humbly, faithfully, perseveringly, confidently. Let 
 him pray wisely, by which I mean, let him pray for 
 those things which minister to the divine glory and 
 the salvation of his neighbours. God is all-powerful, 
 therefore do not in your prayers prescribe how He shall 
 act; He is all-wise — therefore do not determine when. 
 Do not let your prayers break forth heedlessly, but let 
 them follow the guidance of faith, remembering that 
 faith has steady regard to the divine word. Those 
 things, therefore, which God promises absolutely in His 
 word, those pray for absolutely. Those which He 
 promises conditionally — for example, temporal things — 
 those on the same principle pray for conditionally. 
 Those things which He does not promise at all, those 
 also you will not pray for at all. God often grants in 
 His anger what His goodness would deny. Therefore, 
 
 21 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 follow Christ, who fully conforms His will to the will of 
 God.' So wrote the Lutheran Gerhard in his Holy 
 Meditations. His advice follows exactly the lines along 
 which our previous considerations have led us. Prayer, 
 we saw, is a form of intelligent correspondence with 
 the revealed will of God. This is the thought we are 
 to continually have in mind when we attempt to 
 answer the often repeated question — what ought we to 
 pray for? 
 
 Confining ourselves first of all to the practical aspect 
 of the subject, we may put our answer under four 
 heads. 
 
 1. The main object of our prayers must be spiritual 
 things. If we are to pray in the name of Christ, we 
 must seek first the kingdom of God and His righteous- 
 ness. That is the lesson of the Lord's Prayer. Nor 
 can we omit to notice, that if in one Gospel it is said 
 that our ' Father in heaven will give good things to 
 them that ask him/ the good things are described in 
 another Gospel as 'the Holy Spirit.' 1 For so far as 
 we are Christians in heart, it is upon the possession of 
 the Spirit, with all that that implies, that our desires 
 are concentrated for ourselves and others. For this we 
 can pray with certainty, with the certainty that our 
 persevering prayers for ourselves and others will be 
 heard and answered in proportion to our faith. I say 
 
 St. Matthew vii. 11 compared with St. Luke xi. 13. 
 22 
 
What may we Pray for f 
 
 answered for ourselves and others : not that God will 
 force the wills of others any more than our own, but 
 that our prayers can secure for them at least the 
 offers of the divine love. This is the region in which 
 our Lord's promise is specially true, ' Verily, I say 
 unto you, whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be 
 thou taken up and cast into the sea; and shall not 
 doubt in his heart, but shall believe that what he saith 
 cometh to pass ; he shall have it.' 1 Our Lord spoke 
 in a figure, but it was a figure familiar to Jewish 
 hearers. The mountain is the mountain of the world- 
 power which hinders the spiritual spread of the 
 kingdom of God in our own hearts and in the world. 
 This is the moral obstacle which the prayer of the 
 Church, in proportion to its reality and to the unity 
 with which it is offered, shall be able to remove. 
 1 What art thou, great mountain ? ' the prophet 
 Zechariah had said of old, 'before Zerubbabel thou 
 shalt become a plain.' 2 
 
 It is then for spiritual things, for the manifestation 
 of spiritual power in the hearts of men, that we are 
 chiefly and primarily to pray. Nor is it easy to over- 
 rate the importance of this right direction of our 
 prayers. True it may be (to take the converse of our 
 Lord's illustration) that even if we ask our Father for 
 a stone He will still give us bread, or for a scorpion, He 
 
 1 St. Mark xi. 23. Zech. iv. 7. 
 
 23 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 will give us fish, 1 but we cannot expect this to be the 
 case where we have the opportunities of better know- 
 ledge ; rather, if we pray amiss, let us fear the judg- 
 ment — ' God gave them their desire, and sent leanness 
 withal into their souls/ 2 Nor must we omit to notice, 
 that in controversies raised by materialists about the 
 efficacy of prayer, this characteristic of Christian prayer 
 lias generally been left out of sight. It has been 
 proposed that we should have experiments to test the 
 efficacy of prayer in regard to the long life of kings, 
 or the recovery of the sick. But nothing can be more 
 certain than this, that prayer is meant to be an exercise 
 of faith which cannot be subjected in our present life 
 to external testing. And that chiefly because it is in 
 the region of character, in the region where results 
 only fully appear in the eternal world, that prayer is 
 to find its most assured and definite answer. 
 
 2. But not all spiritual boons can be asked for. 
 What is asked for must be in accordance with the 
 divine will. Thus, to ask (as many people do) that they 
 may escape sin, when they will not take reasonable 
 precautions to avoid the occasions of temptation; or 
 to pray for our children, without taking any proper 
 pains in regard to their education ; or to pray for 
 spiritual graces, while we refuse the means which the 
 divine will has appointed for their reception ; or to pray 
 
 1 St. Matt. vii. 9. 2 Psal. cvi. 15. 
 
 24 
 
Wliat may ive Pray for f 
 
 for forgiveness for ourselves, when we will neither for- 
 give others nor accept the punishment of our own sins 
 — these are all examples of the way in which we may 
 pray for spiritual things lawlessly, or without reference 
 to the will of God. 
 
 3. But it cannot be doubted that we may pray also 
 for physical things. They must hold the subordinate 
 place that is given them in the Lord's Prayer, but that 
 place they must hold — a lesser place than was given 
 them in the Old Testament, but still a place. A cer- 
 tain supply of physical things, our daily bread, is 
 necessary to enable us and others to do the work of 
 God in the world ; thus Give us, we pray, our daily 
 bread. And that petition can be taken to cover prayers 
 for health of body, and bettering of social conditions, 
 and favourable weather. Only we can never pray for 
 these physical blessings with the same security or 
 absoluteness as for spiritual. ' Whom the Lord loveth 
 he chasteneth.' Everything that is included in daily 
 bread He finally denied to His own Son. To Him He 
 finally gave no physical deliverance in this life, but left 
 Him in the extremest sense without physical support. 
 This is the profound lesson which we learn about 
 prayer from the prayer of Christ in the Garden of 
 Gethsemane. So clearly supreme are spiritual over 
 physical things as objects of prayer, that physical 
 things can only be prayed for conditionally — ' Father, 
 if it be possible ' ; and may be denied even to the well- 
 
 25 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 beloved, even as the cup did not pass from Christ 
 without His drinking it. Still, granted this, there are 
 a great number of physical things which, as far as the 
 Christian in this world can see, it would be good for 
 him or others to have, such as health, supply of food, 
 weather, and so on. In regard to these we should put 
 up real petitions, which, if accompanied with a willing- 
 ness to see them not granted, or prefaced by ' Not my 
 will, but thine be done/ should still be prayers which 
 expect an answer from the divine love. It is the great 
 function of the spiritual man to see to it, that within 
 that region where the human will has its exercise, 
 spiritual motives and forces shall have their full sway 
 in determining events; and for all we know the divine 
 government of the world may, for the testing of our 
 faith, have left a real function for prayer to fulfil in 
 reinforcing the springs of vitality in sick men, and 
 even in ordering, within certain limits, the character of 
 the weather. 
 
 4. I say, ' for all we know/ and I am looking at the 
 matter now practically, not metaphysically. How do 
 we know the divine will? We know it from the 
 revelation in conscience and through Christ. We know 
 it also in the order of the physical world. Science 
 has recently been disclosing increasingly what the 
 order of the physical world is, what its laws are. Like 
 the revealed laws of the spiritual kingdom, the known 
 physical laws are limits to prayer. No doubt from 
 
 26 
 
What may ive Pray for ? 
 
 time to time prophets and righteous men have been 
 specially inspired to pray for miracles. With such 
 exceptional inspirations we are not now concerned. 
 Ordinarily, a known law of the physical world is a 
 declaration of the will of God. So far, therefore, as the 
 physical laws of the world are known, so far as scientific 
 men can prophesy what will happen in accordance with 
 these laws, to pray against them would be to pray 
 against God. But there is a region into which human 
 prescience cannot penetrate. We know indeed that it 
 belongs to the fixed order of nature that we should not 
 have tropical weather in a temperate climate, but 
 within limits there is no fixed order in the sequence of 
 different kinds of weather which is known to us. It is 
 certainly true that men, by planting or destroying trees, 
 can in lapse of time modify weather. Nor can it be 
 said to be certain, from a scientific point of view, that 
 the action of free will by means of prayer may not 
 have a similar power within similar limits to modify 
 the weather — conceivably through the mediation of 
 invisible spiritual forces or persons, as to which we 
 know nothing. We doubt very much whether those 
 scientific men who will be most peremptory in denying 
 this, will be prepared to admit that there is such a 
 thing at all as a real freedom within certain restricted 
 limits, assigned to human wills in ordering the course 
 of physical events ; or that we can, by the exercise of 
 our free wills, make the course of events different from 
 
 27 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 what it otherwise would have been. Granted there is 
 this freedom, for example, to modify weather by plant- 
 ing trees or accumulating waters, there can be no 
 scientific demonstration that prayer may not have a 
 similar restricted but real influence. 
 
 Christians will certainly go on trustfully commend- 
 ing their wishes about the weather to their heavenly 
 Father's attention, as well as the health of their friends, 
 until science has got a power, altogether different from 
 what it now wields, of predictiDg future events in these 
 districts of experience. For only such power of pre- 
 diction would make it apparent that in these, as in the 
 vaster physical movements, events are simply determined 
 in accordance with physical laws, without any reference 
 to moral or spiritual causes. And if this seems alread} T 
 certain to men of physical science, on the other hand, 
 the spiritual experience of men of prayer has in all ages 
 given them great encouragement in praying for the 
 recovery of their friends and for seasonable weather. 
 
 In this paper I have trespassed very slightly on 
 the speculative ground, and my main object was to 
 give a practical answer to the question, what are the 
 proper objects of prayer ? To deal at length with the 
 philosophic or scientific problem would require more 
 space than is at present at my command, and more 
 knowledge. But the broad position of the Christian is 
 this, and in occupying it he stands on the strongest 
 ground — It is the business of the spiritual man to 
 
 28 
 
What may we Pray for ? 
 
 assert, within certain limits, the mastery of the human 
 spirit in accordance with the divine will over its 
 material surroundings. It does this mainly through 
 the strengthening of character. It does it in part 
 through altering external conditions. How far the 
 power allowed to the human spirit extends into the 
 material world cannot be certainly said, but limits can 
 only be assigned to it with certainty at that point 
 where science can prove the importance of human 
 freedom by predictions of the course of events on a 
 basis purely physical ; and the power of prayer may be 
 commensurate with the power of the human spirit. If 
 we can alter circumstances by willing and working, we 
 may alter them also by willing and praying. But we 
 must not conclude this discussion without repeating 
 that the main objects of Christian prayer are spiritual 
 things. Only in regard to these can prayer rise with 
 the confident expectation of being answered. 
 
 29 
 
IV 
 
 ©ur jfatber wbfcb art in 1bea\>en 
 
 Our Lord, as was said above, did not give us mere 
 abstract principles of prayer, but something much more 
 intelligible— an example or pattern of prayer. And 
 this, which we call ' The Lord's Prayer/ is not so much 
 one prayer among many, as for Christians the type 
 in which all their praying is to be moulded, the form 
 which is to express each petition they wish to offer, the 
 test of whether indeed it is a permissible petition at all. 
 We proceed then to reflect upon its several clauses. 
 
 Our Father which art in heaven. 
 
 We begin by solemnly invoking God under His 
 character as a Father. To approach God as our Father 
 was indeed in apostolic times understood to be the great 
 and distinctive privilege of Christians. ' God hath sent 
 forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, 
 Abba, Father.' 1 And indeed it requires but little 
 thought to perceive that it makes the whole difference 
 
 1 1 Gal. iv. 6. 
 30 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 in prayer whether we in fact realize that God is our 
 common Father. What we ask of men, and the expect- 
 ation with which we ask it, depends on what we think 
 of them. With what difference in our hopes do we ask 
 for some sacrifice or some kindness of different people ! 
 With what fulness of hope ought we to present our- 
 selves with our requests before God, whom we believe 
 in as Father. God's Fatherhood means that He has 
 brought us into being. The responsibility for bringing 
 other lives into existence rests indeed in large measure 
 on earthly parents. But behind all, it rests on God our 
 Creator. God, who has created us, because He is also 
 our Father, is bound to care for each of His creatures ; 
 bound to make the best of each. Not indeed that He 
 can exempt them from the moral discipline which 
 belongs to rational and free beings, or can exempt them 
 from the consequences of it. God, we may well say, 
 cannot prevent us experiencing the consequences, and 
 even the eternal consequences, of our own moral wilful- 
 ness. But, consistently with the laws of our being, He 
 can make the best of us. And this we can confidently 
 entreat of Him to do for each. None is forgotten in 
 His sight. None is under-rated. There is no forgetful- 
 ness and no favouritism. There is discipline for all, but 
 contempt for none. The God whom we approach is 
 the Father of all, and accepts — nay, desires to have 
 pressed upon Him in prayer — the responsibility of His 
 Fatherhood. 
 
 31 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 And we further qualify His Fatherhood by the 
 addition to ' Our Father ' of the words ' which art in 
 heaven. 1 No doubt this expression recalls a time when 
 men thought of the sky as a vault not so very far above 
 their heads, and of God, or gods, as residing just be- 
 yond the vault, as it were on the upper storey of the 
 universal house. Now in our scientific age we know 
 that there is no ceiling over our heads, and no possibility 
 of locating God somewhere above. But none the less 
 we cannot help thinking and talking in the old figures ; 
 and we know what ' lift up your hearts ' means as well 
 as our less scientific forefathers. Indeed, long before 
 the age of science, long before the time of our Lord, 
 God's residence in heaven had come to have a moral 
 meaning attached to it. His spiritual omnipresence 
 was asserted by psalmists and prophets, and the true 
 meaning of His heavenliness proclaimed. 'As the 
 heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways 
 higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your 
 thoughts.' 1 The idea then that we are intended to 
 attach to God's heavenly Fatherhood is, that He is 
 infinitely raised above us in the height of His holiness 
 and the largeness of His wisdom. To call God our 
 Father in heaven, is to lift up our minds in awful 
 reverence above all the narrowness, short-sightedness, 
 shallowness, and defilement of earth, and to remember 
 
 1 Isa. lv. 9. 
 32 
 
TJie Lord's Prayer 
 
 that the best we can think or imagine or hope is but a 
 feeble image of the largeness, the resourcefulness, the 
 richness, the holiness of the mind of God. ' God is in 
 heaven, and thou upon earth ; therefore let thy words 
 be few.' * God is farther from us in the loftiness of 
 His revealed character than ever He seemed to be to 
 Greeks or Romans, who fashioned Him after their own 
 likeness in temper and lusts. But, on the other hand, 
 He is infinitely nearer to us in the condescension of 
 His love. It is only sin that kept earth, the abode of 
 men, apart from heaven, the abode of God. Now the 
 ' kingdom of heaven ' or ' of God ' is ' come ' ; it is 
 1 within us/ or among us. Our ' citizenship is in 
 heaven.' The Christian institutions are ' heavenly 
 things.' We are made to sit ' in heavenly places in 
 Christ.' 2 All this language describes the intimate 
 closeness of union which in Christ has been granted us 
 with the heavenly God. Thus in appealing to ' our 
 Father which is in heaven ' we are appealing to one 
 who is ' closer than breathing ' and ' nearer than hands 
 and feet,' to whom the slightest motion of the heart 
 and will is audible. How is it, then, that so many 
 people still in their spiritual imagination think of God 
 in heaven as if He were far off, so that it needed some 
 great effort to penetrate to His abode ? 
 
 1 Eccl. v. 2. 
 
 ■ St. Matt. xii. 28 ; St. Luke xvii. 21 ; PhiL iii. 20 ; Heb. ix. 23 ; 
 Eph. i. 3. 
 
 33 D 
 
Prayer, and The Lords Prayer 
 
 Hallowed he Thy Name. 
 
 The name of God means the revelation of God, or 
 rather God as He makes Himself known to men ; and 
 we may say, that human history is in one aspect the 
 record of the way in which God has gradually spelt out 
 His name among men, or suffered them to spell it out. 
 Something of that name is discovered in the aspect and 
 processes of nature ; something again is audible in the 
 whispered suggestions and threatenings of conscience ; 
 some elements of it have become apparent to the 
 founders of the different religions of the world ; but 
 nowhere is the gradual process of discovery so distinct 
 as among the Jews. At the bottom of the Old Testa- 
 ment revelation the personality and personal dealings 
 of God are indeed strongly emphasized, but the con- 
 ceptions of His infinitude, His holiness, His spirituality, 
 leave still very much to be gained. That His holiness 
 is moral, not ceremonial, reveals itself to prophet after 
 prophet. His love is discovered to a Hosea, His 
 impartiality to an Ezekiel, His sympathy with the 
 sorrows of His people to an Isaiah. And all that was 
 disclosed to prophets was deepened in His revelation by 
 the Son, through whom the name of God is finally 
 spelt out as the name of the Father, the Son, and the 
 Holy Ghost, with all the moral significance attaching to 
 each of the elements of this threefold name. 
 
 In the Lord's Prayer the place of primary importance 
 is given to the petition that God's revelation of Himself 
 
 34 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 may be held in honour, " Hallowed be thy Name." 
 The matter of first and dominant importance is, that 
 men should believe and hold what is true about the 
 being and character of God, and believing aright, should 
 let their belief be expressed in the reverence of their 
 lives. 
 
 It may be said of the pagan religions — not without 
 qualification, but generally — that the character ascribed 
 to God in them is the simple reflection of the character 
 of His worshippers. The most powerful modern ex- 
 pression of this lower anthropomorphism, this fashion- 
 ing of gods after the image of men, is to be found 
 in Browning's poem of Caliban upon Setebos. Poor 
 savage Caliban is there represented as ascribing all his 
 own arbitrariness and fitfulness to Setebos his god. 
 This is an universal tendency ; but in the Bible we have 
 the record of the counter process, which, if it were going 
 on everywhere in a measure, was nowhere enacted as 
 among the Jews — the process of God impressing Himself 
 as He truly is on the hearts and intellects of His people. 
 True it is that the self-revelation of God at its highest 
 verifies the belief in a special kinship of man to God. 
 Man at his best recognizes his own best self infinitely 
 glorified in the character of God as manifested in Christ. 
 Still, here is a revelation of God to man, not a fashion- 
 ing of God after man's ideas ; and the result is, that it 
 lays on men a strong and searching claim to re-model 
 their own natures, that they may become truly in the 
 
 35 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 divine image. To believe in God as He is indeed, 
 is to recognize our need to be born again and fashioned 
 anew. 
 
 How is it that some people are so shallow-minded as 
 to suppose that it makes no difference what a man 
 believes about God ? The contrary lies written in the 
 record of history. For, however inconsistent are men's 
 beliefs and practices, if you look at individual men at a 
 particular moment, yet if you look at human nature in 
 its long reaches and over its broad surfaces, it appears 
 that men's conduct has depended on what they think 
 about God. The civilizations which have grown up 
 under the influence of Jewish, Greek, Mohammedan, 
 Buddhist, and Christian beliefs about God, have been 
 morally different civilizations. And the necessary con- 
 nection between the intelligence and the will in man 
 makes it necessary that belief should, in the long run, 
 mould behaviour. 
 
 Hallowed be God's name then ! Let Christians 
 believe with all their hearts in the Father, Son, and 
 Holy Ghost — one God ; and believing, have the courage 
 to profess their belief, and let it mould their public 
 conduct and their private lives. It is probably quite 
 true, in fact mathematically true, that ' there lives more 
 faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds/ for half 
 the creeds, that is, the beliefs of half the believers, are 
 little more than formalisms, and of little moral value ; 
 whereas honest doubts, the sincere seekings of the 
 
 36 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 perplexed hearts from whom God's face is hidden, have 
 a great deal of moral value, and are undoubtedly on the 
 way to final light. But it does not therefore follow, nor 
 is it true, that ' there lives more faith/ or more value, in 
 doubts in general than in sincere creeds. Indeed, quite 
 the opposite is the case ; and no one who knows any- 
 thing of current society can fail to perceive that a great 
 deal which passes for religious doubt proceeds from 
 little but want of moral effort, and worldliness, and very 
 often lack of moral courage. Doubt, however inevitable 
 in some cases, need not be a normal condition of mind. 
 Renan used cynically to remark, that very few people 
 have the qualifications for being sceptics. And if we 
 want to play our part as men and Christians in the 
 world, we should do our best to believe simply, and to 
 confess loyally in worship and in conduct the faith 
 which we believe. How vast a part of what is worst in 
 modern society is due to lack of moral courage ! How 
 deep the truth in our Lord's question — ' How can ye 
 believe which seek glory one of another, and the glory 
 which cometh of the only God ye seek not ? ' A 
 
 Let us then learn to pray Hallowed be Thy Name, and 
 indeed to give it the dominant and leading place in all 
 our prayers. God has revealed Himself. If under a veil, 
 He can yet be known by us, and we pray that the infinite 
 benefit of this revelation of Himself may be realized and 
 accepted by all men. Hallowed be Thy Name by being 
 believed. And believing on God in their hearts, we pray 
 
 37 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 that men may not be ashamed of their best selves, but 
 may confess Him in their lives, and pay to Him the out- 
 ward reverence which is reasonable from men to God. 
 Hallowed be Thy Name, by frank outivard confession. 
 And we pray that the public worship of the Church may 
 be a worship in spirit and in truth, a worship worthy 
 of its great object; for we remember the sane words 
 of Hooker — 'Duties of religion performed by whole 
 societies of men ought to have in them a sensible 
 excellency correspondent to the majesty of Him 
 whom we worship.' Hallowed be Thy Name by 
 glorious and spiritual worship. Lastly, we pray that 
 men may hallow the name of God in their own private 
 lives, and live worthily of that holy name in that 
 ' holiness without which no man shall see the Lord.' 
 Hallowed be Thy Name in the continual sanctification of 
 the lives of Christians, that they may indeed be, in the 
 Son and through the Spirit, a holy priesthood to God, 
 even the Father. 
 
 38 
 
TTbg fting&om come ♦ . ♦ as in *>ea\>en so 
 on Eartb 
 
 What is a kingdom ? It is a society of men living 
 in an orderly manner a common life under one head or 
 ruler. The kingdom of God is this, but more. For 
 human rule is over men only, speaking generally ; the 
 rule of God is over all created things whatever. Thus 
 the kingdom of God is an orderly constitution of all 
 things visible and invisible, inanimate, animate and 
 spiritual, each in its own place fulfilling the divine will. 
 
 A kingdom is not a kingdom unless there is order. 
 A perfect kingdom involves perfect order. Thus the 
 idea of order in nature and in the world as a whole was 
 postulated by religion, from the point of view of the 
 kingdom of God, long before it was postulated by 
 science. God, says the Psalmist, has given to all the 
 parts of nature 'a law which shall not be broken.' 
 The divine Wisdom, says the later Solomon, ' reacheth 
 from one end of the world to the other with full strength, 
 
 39 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 and ordereth all things graciously.' 1 But as soon as 
 ever we have begun to think of the world as a divine 
 kingdom with a divine order, the question at once 
 arises, is this order perfect and complete ? And the 
 prompt answer is, No. Without doing violence to our 
 moral conscience, it is impossible to treat wickedness, 
 cruelty, falsehood, as a part of a divine order or the 
 keeping of a divine command. Thus we are landed in 
 the position of St. John. Sin is lawlessness. 2 St. John's 
 expression in the Greek language means exactly that 
 sin and lawlessness are coincident. Nowhere in the 
 world is there disorder till you come to the wilfulness or 
 sin of spiritual beings, and sin does not begin till wilful- 
 ness or lawlessness begins. This is the fundamental 
 Christian doctrine of sin. Sin is not imperfection 
 merely, the imperfection of undeveloped natures, which 
 it only requires time to develop more perfectly. Sin, 
 again, is not ignorance which it requires only right 
 knowledge to remove. Imperfection and ignorance 
 indeed are realities and have to be reckoned with ; but 
 the wilfulness of spiritual beings using their freedom to 
 rebel against God, and so spoiling the divine order in 
 the world down to the depth to which their power and 
 activity extend — this and this only is sin. This rebel- 
 lion of free spirits has its effects on the sinning 
 individual, and its results are also transmitted as a long 
 
 1 Wisdom viii. 1 (B. V.). 2 1 John iii. 4. (R. V.). 
 
 40 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 heritage of misery and disorder to those who come after. 
 This idea of sin was in a measure, by the help of their 
 consciences, arrived at by thinkers outside the revela- 
 tion of the Old and New Covenant. There is, for 
 example, a splendid expression of sin as spoiling the 
 divine order of the world in that hymn to Zeus of 
 the stoic Cleanthes, from which St. Paul at Athens 
 quoted the expression, ' For we are also the offspring 
 of God.' ' Nothing,' cries Cleanthes, ' takes place on 
 earth apart from Thee, nor in the heaven above, nor in 
 the deep, except the things which bad men do in their 
 senselessness, . . . who neither perceive nor listen to 
 the common law of God.' But the doctrine received 
 its most authoritative declaration in the New Testament. 
 Throughout that volume man is treated as a being 
 involved in sin, who needs therefore not only develop- 
 ment and enlightenment, but also redemption. And 
 the beginning of this mystery of sin is not found in the 
 human will ; for broad and deep as has been the 
 development of sin among men, there is still beyond 
 men an order of rebel wills about whom we know little, 
 but of whose existence and activity we are assured, the 
 devil and his angels, to whose activity man's seduction 
 is traced, and who are represented as being at work not 
 in man only, but in nature. 
 
 Now all this is taken for granted when we pray ' Thy 
 kingdom come.' The necessity for this prayer arises 
 only because the rule of God in the world has been — 
 
 41 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 not indeed banished, but obscured. So that from the 
 point of view of sinful, alienated man, the kingdom 
 of God, His manifested rule, must be treated as an 
 absent thing to be desired and invoked. 
 
 But it may be said, Has not that kingdom come ? 
 Is it not the kingdom of Christ ? Was it not to 
 establish or re-establish it that Christ came ? Quite 
 true. Our Lord taught us that it came with His 
 coming, and at the same time He taught His disciples 
 to pray for it as a thing not yet come. Here is a con- 
 tradiction in words such as our Lord never shrank 
 from, because the apparent contradiction challenges 
 thought and reveals a deeper meaning underneath. 
 
 The kingdom of God or of Heaven has come. For 
 our Lord established a Church, or visible society, which 
 He identified with the kingdom. His parables of the 
 drag-net that gathered of every kind of fish (St. Matt. 
 xiii.47), and of the field of wheat amidst which tares are 
 sown by an enemy (St. Matt. xiii. 24), both represent 
 the kingdom of God as a visible institution or society 
 in which the good and evil are mixed together. They 
 identify, in fact, the kingdom of God with the visible 
 Church. Again, when our Lord said that John the 
 Baptist, though he was the greatest of those born of 
 woman, was yet, by his very position, outside the 
 kingdom of God, 1 so that the little ones in the king- 
 dom have higher privileges than he, He identifies the 
 
 1 St. Matt. xi. 11. 
 42 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 kingdom of God with the society He was founding. 
 The Church, then, is the kingdom of God, or the king- 
 dom of Heaven, because it is an organized society ot 
 men, in which Christ is the Head and King, in which 
 His will is known and obeyed, and in which visible 
 ceremonies and outward realities are interpenetrated 
 with the life of heaven. It was pointed out in the last 
 paper, how the language of the New Testament con- 
 tinually supposes that to be in the Church is to be 
 among the heavenly things or in the heavenly places. 
 Thus the Church is, in virtue of the spiritual realities 
 that it enshrines, truly and really the kingdom of God. 
 But it is so within limitations ; for in the first place, if 
 the power of the kingdom is at work within the Church, 
 it is so secretly ; the kingdom is not manifested openly 
 before man's eyes. It requires faith to recognize it and 
 see it. And in the next place, the power is only felt 
 in a comparatively narrow region, within the limits of a 
 society which does not represent the whole of mankind, 
 still less the whole of the universe. Thus, if from the 
 point of view of the spiritual forces that are at work in 
 her, the Church is the kingdom, from another and 
 larger point of view the Church represents the kingdom 
 within a certain area of time and place, and prepares 
 for the larger and fuller representation of the empire of 
 God in the universe. 
 
 When we pray, then, ' Thy kingdom come,' we are 
 praying for the spread of the Church, for all that 
 
 43 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 promotes her spiritual well-being and influence, for the 
 believing of her message, for the acceptance of the grace 
 which she is permitted to dispense, for the practice of 
 her discipline among those who are at present neglecting 
 it, and in the world of heathendom where men have 
 not yet learnt the meaning of the sacred name. All 
 that a Churchman can desire in the Church and for the 
 Church is contained in the prayer, ' Thy kingdom come.' 
 But also, and perhaps more prominently, it is a prayer 
 for the second coming of Christ, that is, the manifest 
 and open exhibition of His empire, not only over and in 
 the Church, but in the whole universe. 
 
 Let us learn to pray, then, ' Thy kingdom come,' over 
 our own lawless and rebellious thoughts, desires, and 
 passions ; and in the world outside us, wherever a selfish 
 luxury and sensuality, or jealousy, selfishness and cruelty, 
 or pride and wilfulness and contempt of the truth 
 prevail. And, to speak plainly, this is almost every- 
 where, in our domestic life and commerce and politics, 
 very often in religion. Moreover, we cannot pray for 
 the kingdom unless we are prepared to fight for it also. 
 We all love peace and smoothness, but we forget that if 
 peace is the end of Christ's rule, war is the method by 
 which it is to be won. ' I came not to send peace on 
 earth, but a sword.' That is what we do so terribly 
 forget. This duty of fighting for the kingdom of God, 
 for the cause of truth and righteousness and meekness, 
 belongs to all Christians : not to the clergy, but to the 
 
 44 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 Christians. We shall make no palpable way in the 
 world at all till we have learnt that the Church does 
 not consist of the clergy, bat that every baptized 
 member of the body of Christ is pledged to be a fighter 
 for the truth and the morality of the kingdom in every 
 single department of his life. This is not comfortable 
 doctrine at all, yet it is the doctrine we want. And 
 Established Churches need more particularly to recollect, 
 that to be doing this is the only sort of Church defence 
 against the judgments of God that has any real value 
 whatever. Thy kingdom come, then, God, as in 
 heaven so on earth ! 
 
 For the phrase, ' as in heaven so on earth,' applies 
 in all probability not only to the clause after which 
 it occurs about the divine will, but also to the two 
 earlier ones — Hallowed be Thy Name, as in heaven so 
 on earth; Thy kingdom come, as in heaven so on 
 earth. Let that day come when the supremacy of the 
 Lord and His Christ shall be an open and acknowledged 
 thing, which may be to some anguish unutterable, but 
 can be to none deniable. Meanwhile, let the Mngs of 
 the earth stand up, and the rulers take council tog :ther 
 against uhe Lord and against His Anointed ; but we at 
 least will not be frightened. He that dwelleth in 
 heaven shall laugh them to scorn, and on the over- 
 throw of all rebellious enterprises and long-drawn-out 
 antagonisms open and secret, the kingdoms of the world 
 shall become the kingdom of the Lord and of His Christ. 
 
 45 
 
VI 
 
 ZTbs will be fcone, as in Ibeaven so on Eavtb 
 
 Paul Bourget, the well-known French novelist and 
 man of letters, went three years ago for a visit to 
 America. What impressed him there, with a force 
 which appears continually in the fascinating account of 
 his expedition which he has given in Outre-mer, was 
 the omnipresent spirit of enterprise. Everywhere in 
 men and women he met with a vigorous and powerful 
 will — a will bent on being successful, bent on seizing the 
 exact situation under which present effectiveness was 
 most possible. This vigorous will, this enterprise, is, 
 as we all proudly recognize, the mark of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race ; but then, as we know it, this vigorous will 
 has a way of showing itself in the form of vigorous 
 competition. We walk down the streets of our towns, 
 and watch one tradesman contending against another 
 in a self-advertisement, to say the least of it, not over- 
 scrupulous about truth, each using all his cleverness to 
 under-sell and make life impossible for the other. And 
 
 /6 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 what we see among individuals appears also among 
 classes. If Labour organizes itself, it is against Capital. 
 If Capital combines, it is to offer more effective resist- 
 ance to the pressure of a strong Trades Union. The 
 area enlarges itself, but its spirit is still the same. In 
 France, in Germany, in England, in Russia, in Italy 
 a vast expenditure is going on to arm every nation 
 against every other. And the same competition is at 
 least as apparent in the race for Africa, or the jealous 
 watching of one nation by another, lest any should get 
 an advantage over the others in the dismemberment of 
 the Turkish Empire. Nor is this spirit less apparent 
 in the matter of religion. The assertion of the in- 
 dividual will, the determination to work a successful 
 enterprise, in a word, the spirit of competition, has 
 intruded itself there. It has split the Christian Church 
 into an infinite number of sects; and it is only too 
 lamentably apparent, that a large proportion of what is 
 called religious energy is occupied, not in combating sin 
 and falsehood, but in pressing against one another the 
 claims of different religious bodies. Enterprise, energy, 
 will, ambition, these are marks then of the human race, 
 and especially the Anglo-Saxon race, and the form in 
 which they show themselves is a universal and un- 
 limited competition. 
 
 Now there is no doubt at all that, if we are to make 
 the best of ourselves, we must kindle to the very utter- 
 most in all men the will to be, the will to realize all 
 
 47 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 that is in them ; nay, more, we must kindle even the 
 appetite for enjoyment, for after all enjoyment is, as 
 Aristotle says, the crown and accompaniment of every 
 completed activity, and to develop our faculties is in 
 the long run to secure the most permanent and deepest 
 enjoyment. And it is also no doubt true, that this 
 will to realize ourselves carries us far off from one 
 another and makes us different. To work at our best 
 is to work with the greatest amount of individual 
 difference. We work best when we are least restrained 
 by the cramping necessity of being like some one else. 
 The development of individuality then means the 
 development of differences, means a world full of strong 
 and dissimilar modes of operation. Then the question 
 arises, must strong and unlike individualities be neces- 
 sarily in antagonism ? Can there be no vigour except 
 competitive vigour, and no development of unlikeness 
 that is not also a development of hostility ? Now it is 
 to this question that the better conscience of mankind, 
 wearied with the waste of life which unlimited com- 
 petition produces, is giving an emphatic No. Every- 
 where men of all sorts are asking, how can we introduce 
 a spirit of co-operation to supplant or to modify the 
 spirit of competition ? Thus we are aiming at Boards 
 of Conciliation between Capital and Labour, which 
 shall represent to each party that their separate 
 interests lie not only in the strong organization of each, 
 but also in the recognition of a common interest over 
 
 48 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 both. There is more real hope than at any previous 
 time of the establishment of a system of arbitration, at 
 least between the two great and predominantly Anglo- 
 Saxon nations. Once again, when people see some 
 necessity of life, such as water, manipulated not always 
 in the interests of the consumer, to the profit of a body 
 of shareholders in a water company, they are asking 
 themselves, why should not the municipality (every- 
 where, as has already been done in some places) take 
 the place of the private company, and let the water be 
 manipulated in the interests of all ? Tardily, moreover, 
 — lamentably tardily, but still we hope with greater 
 promise of effectiveness — the same class of questions 
 is being asked in the region of religion, and the anti- 
 Christian spectacle of rival and competing sects is at 
 least becoming a burden on the consciences of a greater 
 number of people. Thus everywhere the old Christian 
 idea of the body corporate is on the way to a revival. 
 The body represents unity in diversity ; it results from 
 the development of the most marked variety of function 
 in individual limbs, the most marked variety of differ- 
 ences in their methods of working, but all dominated 
 by one common interest — not competing, but co-operat- 
 ing. ' For the body is one and hath many members, 
 and all the members of the body, being many, are one 
 body. If the foot shall say, because I am not the hand 
 I am not of the body, it is not therefore not of the 
 body ; and if the ear shall say, because I am not the 
 
 49 e 
 
Prayer, and The Lords Prayer 
 
 eye I am not of the body, it is not therefore not of the 
 body. If the whole body were an eye where were the 
 hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the 
 smelling ? But now they are many members, but one 
 body; and the eye cannot say to the hand I have no 
 need of thee, or again, the head to the feet I have no 
 need of you. Nay, much rather, those members of the 
 body which seem to be more feeble are necessary ; and 
 those parts of the body which we think to be less 
 honourable, on these we put on (in the way of dress) 
 more abundant honour, and our uncomely parts have 
 more abundant comeliness; whereas our comely parts 
 have no need. But God tempered the body together, 
 giving more abundant honour to the parts which 
 lacked; that there should be no schism in the body, 
 but that the members should have the same care one 
 for another, and where one member suffers all the 
 members suffer with it, and where one member is 
 honoured all the members rejoice with it.' 
 
 This is the divine ideal of the Universe, that each 
 creature — inanimate, animate, rational — should find its 
 joy in realizing its own function, that is, in being the 
 thing it is meant to be, in experiencing the joy proper 
 to itself, and in seeing all the other creatures realizing 
 all their separate functions, while all together contribute 
 to a common end. No doubt sacrifice, the sacrifice of 
 one to the other, is more or less knit up into the heart 
 of this process. But God does not shrink from requiring 
 
 50 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 sacrifice. No doubt gradation is inseparable from 
 combination, and one must rejoice to be higher, and 
 another rejoice to be lower. But God has no sympathy 
 with the desire to excel each the other for vain-glory's 
 sake. When Dante in Paradise expected to find those 
 in its lowest places deploring that they were not 
 higher, he was reproved for introducing an idea of 
 competition and jealousy altogether subversive of the 
 life of heaven. 
 
 ' E la sua voluntade e nostra pace.' 
 
 * God's will is our peace,' was the reply of the questioned 
 spirit. That is the law of heaven, the law of archangels 
 and angels and just men made perfect, each joyfully 
 occupying his own place and fulfilling his own function 
 — each obeying, and in obedience free ; free, because he 
 finds in obedience his essential good. And we pray, 
 like Richard Hooker on his death-bed, that this law of 
 heaven may become the law of earth — to the over- 
 throw of the principle of mere self-assertion and com- 
 petition, Thy will be done, as in heaven so on earth. 
 
 It was for the realizing of this ideal that the Church 
 was divinely created. Its maxim is, let each man look 
 not to his own things only, but also to the things of 
 others ; and its ideal has been again and again realized, 
 at least, in great and effective measure. In the early 
 Church, in days when it cost men much to become 
 Christians, we have a spectacle of happy co-operation, 
 
 51 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 the like of which the world has never seen equalled. 
 And, again and again, when the spirit of worldliness 
 and competition has corrupted the Church at large, 
 earnest men have gathered themselves together and 
 formed fresh centres of unselfish life, centres of co- 
 operation. Such were the religious orders, especially 
 in the West, both of men and women ; such was the 
 co-operative family life among the Moravians ; such is 
 to be found in the heart of every Christian parish or 
 enterprise where the Spirit of God is at work. Every- 
 where there are men and women taxing all their 
 energies in work, for their own happiness, no doubt, 
 but also for the common good — the good of the whole 
 body which is the glory of God, for ' the glory of God 
 is the living man.' But, alas ! the measure in which 
 we have realized our ideal is nothing compared with 
 the boundlessness of our failure hitherto. In its own 
 proper sphere the Church has allowed the spirit of the 
 world to enter into her, and she has altogether failed 
 to realize her catholicity by making her power felt in 
 politics and in commerce. Once again we are waking 
 to our duty. Once again we pray with more earnest- 
 ness, that the idea of service like Christ's co-operative 
 service may take the place of selfish ambition and 
 wasteful competition, Thy will be done, as in heaven so 
 on earth. 
 
 52 
 
Ttie Lord's Prayer 
 
 II 
 
 The prayer is a prayer against selfishness; it is 
 equally a prayer against sloth. No doubt, in the 
 world, and especially in our Anglo-Saxon world, there 
 is a great deal of energy, but side by side with it there 
 is a vast deal of sloth. Think of it! The sloth of 
 intellect ; the sloth which seems to make men unwilling, 
 for all our increasing education, to read anything longer 
 than a paragraph in a newspaper with a sensational 
 headline and perhaps a picture. The sloth of intellect 
 which, in religious things, is terrified by the appearance 
 of doubt and difficulty, and imagines that the only sign 
 of excellence in a religion is to be found in that clear- 
 ness of authoritative dogma which will dispense the 
 individual from the trouble of thinking. Or again, 
 sluggishness in prayer, how widespread it is — how 
 paralyzing to one of the richest of human activities ! 
 Or, once more, what sloth there is with regard to the 
 imagination — what a lack of will to regulate effectively 
 this powerful human faculty ! Thus, instead of its 
 being a storehouse of dominant ideas, inspiring, con- 
 secrating, and ruling life, it becomes the mere passive 
 slave of every unclean spectacle, of every foolish sug- 
 gestion, of every profitless day-dream. Once more, 
 what sluggishness of heart there is ! Where true love 
 is kindled every faculty brightens; but where the 
 
 53 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 heart is dead or cold, what paralysis ensues of the 
 faculties of thinking, and sympathizing, and contriving, 
 and willing ! 
 
 1 Thy will be done,' then, is a prayer against sloth. 
 
 ' It is the will sends the renewing nerve 
 Through flaccid flesh, that faints before the time' — 
 
 it is the will ; the human will, but most effectively the 
 human will possessed by the divine will, and following 
 along with it, as with Jesus of Nazareth, in whole- 
 hearted and unconditional obedience to the mind of 
 God. 
 
 Let our imaginations rest, then, on the burning love, 
 the thrilling knowledge of those dimly known spiritual 
 beings, archangels and angels ; on the keen joy of vision 
 which has been obtained by the spirits of just men 
 made perfect. And let us pray that, with a like effect- 
 iveness, now in our days of darkness and difficulty, an 
 effectiveness to be crowned at last with a like reward, 
 God's will may be done, as in heaven so on earth. 
 
 And who can tell what an utterly different place the 
 world would look, if those who do intend to be sincere 
 Christians would realize the duty of vigorous and 
 effective willing, vigorous and effective co-operation, to 
 bring about the kingdom of God in this world ! The 
 Christian religion is a religion of comfort, and ' comfort ' 
 (confortare), with its Greek original, means first of all 
 to make strong or to encourage. Religion is to put 
 
 54 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 heart and courage into us, both to work and to pray, 
 to co-operate according to the divine will both for the 
 overthrow of the kingdom of darkness and the establish- 
 ment of the kingdom of God. 'Thy will be done in 
 earth as it is in heaven.' 
 
 55 
 
VII 
 
 Give us tbis 2)ap our Bails Breafc 
 
 The first point to notice in this clause of the Lord's 
 Prayer is its moderation. In the prayer which is 
 prompted by our natural instinct we ask for everything 
 we happen to want : we put ourselves first ; we are 
 immoderate in our desires ; we seek to bend the divine 
 will to our own wishes. In all these respects, as has 
 been already noticed, the Lord's Prayer puts human 
 instinct under the strongest check. This prayer for the 
 supply of our own needs is not allowed to be uttered 
 till it has been postponed to prayer for the honouring of 
 the divine name, the coming of the divine kingdom, 
 and the doing of the divine will ; and till, in all these 
 respects, the law of heaven has been taken for the law 
 of human conduct. It is only to state the same fact 
 in other words, to call attention to the suppression 
 of individualism which lies in the very words ' us ' and 
 1 our,' words which prevent us praying for anything 
 for ourselves which we cannot equally request for the 
 
 56 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 whole society ; and, once more, the same principle finds 
 expression in the word ■ bread.' It is ' bread,' and 
 not anything we may happen to like, that we are 
 allowed to pray for. This, then, is the prayer of the 
 Christian Church, the prayer which the existing 
 Christian Church here in England to-day is continually 
 repeating. Yet it certainly is not an exaggeration to say, 
 that though there are among us always true Christians 
 praying this prayer in spirit as well as in letter, yet 
 a vast number of repetitions of the Lord's Prayer must 
 be blank hypocrisy ; for it is hypocrisy if the prayer of 
 our lips is a quite different thing from the prayer of our 
 hearts. Yet the prayer of our heart is expressed in 
 what we actually show ourselves to want and to expect 
 in our ordinary life. Listen, then, to two praying 
 Christians, who are discussing the marriage of their 
 son and daughter, and in the process are making a 
 number of assumptions as to what is the minimum 
 of wealth on which life can be reasonably conducted. 
 Look at that other person furnishing a house, or pro- 
 viding for a dinner-party. Think, in short, of all the 
 things which in ordinary conversation Christians are 
 ready to say 'they can't do without.' Think of the 
 money spent in a single rich household on a single 
 article of luxury like champagne, or a single article of 
 dress. Now, things which are the actual wants of 
 actual people are the j)rayers of their hearts. And if 
 they cannot possibly be expressed in a petition for daily 
 
 57 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 bread, then I fear, their saying of the Lord's Prayer is 
 nothing else than a more or less conscious hypocrisy. 
 
 What, then, can daily bread be explained to mean ? 
 Surely it is all that is necessary for us to make the best 
 of our faculties. It is nourishment ; and everything 
 may fairly be called nourishment which can be said to 
 fertilize and liberate the energies of human nature, 
 instead of cloying and clogging them. Once grant this, 
 and it is obvious that very different things are meant 
 by ' bread ' to different people. There is hardly any 
 luxury which has not its use to stimulate this or that 
 nature, or to meet this or that exceptional need. The 
 question whether this or that article of diet or comfort 
 can be used under the head of ' daily bread,' can be 
 answered only by answering the question — Do I work 
 the better for it and pray the better for it ? And in 
 answering this question there are two facts, closely 
 allied, which have to be kept in mind. The first is, 
 that comforts very soon reach the point where they 
 begin to clog instead of liberating human energies. A 
 venerable statesman has been often heard to remark, 
 that the things people say they ' can't do without ' are 
 like the pieces of thread with which the Liliputians 
 bound Gulliver. Each of them could be snapt by 
 itself, but taken together they bound him more tightly 
 than strong cords. Nobody, therefore, can find out what 
 he really needs for his work without constantly testing 
 himself in giving up things. No one can consider a 
 
 58 
 
Tl\e Lords Prayer 
 
 number of well-to-do Englishmen without perceiving 
 that they are materialized ; that is, that the supply 
 of food and drink and comfort generally dulls their 
 intellectual and still more their spiritual powers. In 
 other words, the spirit in them is the slave of the flesh. 
 Here, then, comes in view the second fact. Fasting 
 has been historically a principle of Christianity, and 
 was so in Apostolic Christianity. Rightly stated, the 
 principle of fasting is but the recognition that the flesh 
 has in ordinary human life got the upper hand of the 
 spirit, and that it is time for the spirit to take revenges 
 upon the flesh, and to assert its mastery. Fasting, like 
 every other principle, must have its methods and its 
 rules and its order, or it will fail to take effect ; but I 
 am concerned only now with the principle, and it is 
 this — The Christian will, from time to time, deliberately 
 deny himself in lawful comforts, and nourishments of 
 the body, in order to assert spiritual vitality ; in order 
 to find out what he can do without ; in order to main- 
 tain the principle that ' man doth not live by bread 
 alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
 mouth of God.' 
 
 Bread, then, is the nourishment necessary to make 
 the body an effective instrument for fulfilling the 
 spiritual purpose of our life, or, in other words, to enable 
 us to make the best of ourselves. And what his ' bread ' 
 ought to consist of the individual can never find out 
 unless he has steadily in view the encroaching tendency 
 
 59 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 of the flesh ; unless he is prepared, on the one hand, to 
 make courageous trials in * doing without,' and on the 
 other hand is prepared thankfully to accept anything in 
 the way of holiday, or rest, or food, or drink, or comfort, 
 which reasonable experience shows to be necessary to 
 keep him in efficiency, and make him vigorous in profit- 
 able industry and in communion with God. The body 
 is to be a serviceable instrument, and it is a good 
 creation of God. It is to be the instrument and not 
 the master, but it is to be kept as an efficient instrument, 
 and nob maltreated any more than any other of the 
 creatures of God. 
 
 Now when we reflect, we cannot fail to see that, if 
 over any large area of Christian society the principles 
 embodied in this prayer were really respected, there 
 would be plenty of God's gifts for every one's need. 
 Granted a society in which men would really pray 'Thy 
 will be done on earth/ and ' Give us this day our daily 
 bread,' and would live with even tolerable consistency 
 in accordance with their prayer, — in that society would 
 be found a human life which, if it did not perfectly 
 realize the kingdom of God on earth, would at least be 
 a foretaste and convincing prophecy of it. It is a good 
 thing to take a walk and meditate upon such a proposi- 
 tion. It fixes in our minds this conclusion — the misery 
 of the world is manufactured by man. Certainly — 
 
 ' To the flame that ruineth mankind, 
 Man gives the matter, or at least gives wind.' 
 60 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 II 
 
 Oddly enough, in the simple language of this prayer 
 appears one of the most difficult words in the New 
 Testament. The word translated daily probably means 
 bread ' for the coming day! It has been recently 
 suggested, that its occurrence side by side with ' to-day ' 
 is due to the very early use of this prayer by Christians 
 both morning and evening : that in the morning they 
 said, ' Give us our bread to-day,' and in the evening, 
 ■ Give us our bread for to-morrow.' The suggestion 
 puts us at least on the right line of thought. The 
 prayer is the prayer of those who are content to depend 
 from day to day in trustfulness on their Father's love. 
 When our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount forbade 
 us to be anxious about food or drink or clothing, what 
 He forbade was anxiety, not providence. The birds 
 of the air and the flowers of the field, to which He 
 looked for examples, all in their unconscious way make 
 provision. From the time the seed is sown provision is 
 being made for the growth, and the flowering, and the 
 fruitage, which are each in turn to come. When the 
 birds build their nests they are making provision for the 
 future of themselves and their race. But they do it all 
 without any anxiety. They do each day the work ot 
 the day, and expect each day the supplies of the day. 
 Now granted a like providence, a like industrious work- 
 
 61 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 fulness, and the prayerful trust in God which is the 
 spiritual counterpart of their unanxious happiness, and 
 who can doubt that in ninety-nine cases out of a 
 hundred the prayer, ' Give us this day our daily bread,' 
 would be found to be answered. In other words, the 
 misery of the world, the destitution which we con- 
 tinually hear of, is due either to want of reasonable 
 provision, or to idleness, luxury, and vice, or to prayer- 
 less, thankless want of trust. The prayer, ' Give us 
 to-day our daily bread/ is the prayer of men who are at 
 once thinking and believing and working. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I said the word translated daily means properly the 
 bread ' for to-morrow' But in old days it was very 
 generally translated ' super-substantial ' — that is to 
 say, the bread that is higher than material — or in 
 other words, spiritual bread, ' the bread of life/ So 
 the prayer became associated with the service of the 
 Eucharist, with the continual feeding on the Bread of 
 Life, which is Jesus Christ, very God and very man. 
 Now, the translation was no doubt wrong. The prayer 
 is one for physical and not spiritual nourishment. But 
 yet to the Christian it can never be without the deepest 
 significance, that the bread of the Spirit is given us in 
 
 62 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 common bread ; that the original Eucharist was side by 
 side with the love-feast, the highest things in closest 
 connection with the most ordinary. Alas ! the abuses 
 of the Corinthian Church separated the Eucharist and 
 the love-feast wide apart. Alas ! that it should have 
 been necessary to do so. But though it be necessary, 
 as necessary it is, the principle must never be forgotten 
 which is embodied in the fact, that it is common bread 
 which is made to become to us the body of Christ ; and 
 that the communication to us of Christ's own being, 
 the communion of His body and blood, was made on 
 the occasion and under the forms of a fraternal meal. 
 Thus common eating and drinking* are touched for 
 the Christian with a sacramental meaning ; and the 
 sharing the good things which God provides for our 
 nourishment is one chief means of realizing the unity 
 of the Christian body which is in the one Spirit. 
 There is no real Christian meal which ought not to be 
 consecrated with the thought of unity with Christ, and 
 lifted by the sense of brotherhood and co-operation. 
 1 Give us this day our daily bread,' the bread for the 
 body, and through the bread for the body that life of 
 the soul also which is communion with God and with 
 our brother men. 
 
 So let us pray ' Give us this day our daily bread/ 
 (Is 1 it is the we of each household ; the wc of each 
 parish, each town, in which all classes are mingled 
 together ; it is the we also of the whole Christian 
 
 63 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 family. Our thoughts when we pray this prayer ought 
 sometimes to go out to that unhappy community of 
 Armenians recently butchered and hunted in their 
 mountain homes, and massacred in thousands in the 
 streets of Constantinople, and still subject to con- 
 tinual outrages and murders and forced conversions, 
 while Christian Europe looks on and does nothing, 
 because the nations of the Christian fellowship are 
 so jealous of one another, that no one can be allowed 
 to act without incurring the enmity of the rest. And 
 we ask ourselves — can we pray this prayer for ourselves 
 and our families and our own country, without a feel- 
 ing, deep-seated in our consciences, that somehow the 
 terrible but health-giving judgments of God must 
 fall upon a Christian Europe guilty of this horrible 
 acquiescence ? If we do find ourselves punished, and 
 in our distress crying out to a God who seems deaf 
 or powerless, there is one word of an ancient prophet 
 which would certainly apply to us, * Your sins have 
 withholden good things from you.' 
 
 64 
 
VIII 
 
 fovQivc us our Debts, as we also bax>e 
 XoxQivcn our Debtors 
 
 There is no better means of distinguishing true 
 religion from false, than by ascertaining whether its 
 desire is to be redeemed from sin, or to be merely 
 let off from punishment of sin. False religion is 
 everywhere occupied in persuading its God, by means 
 of intercessors or expiatory sacrifices or prayers, to let 
 it off the punishment to which its sins have laid it 
 open. True religion is never occupied with the 
 thought of punishment. Indeed, it recognizes that it 
 is better to be punished when we have done wrong. 
 What it asks is to be rid of the sin itself, its pollution, 
 its guilt, and its power. ' Make me a clean heart, 
 God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me 
 not away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy 
 Spirit from me.' That is always its cry, and the 
 response is always, ' I will sprinkle clean water upon 
 you, and ye shall be clean : a new heart will I give 
 you, and ye shall be my people, and I will be your 
 
 65 f 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 God.' This being so, we are pulled up short by this 
 petition in the Lord's Prayer, because at first sight it 
 seems to express just the view of sin which falls short 
 of the truth. It represents the sinner as a debtor who 
 asks to be let off his debts, which, as we know very well, 
 from common experience, is just the request which has 
 least moral reality about it, and involves least moral effort. 
 
 We may think of sin, first of all, as the taint, or 
 flaw, or weakness in our own nature. Considered from 
 this point of view, like the disease or weakness of the 
 body, it cries out for nothing else except actual healing, 
 it admits of no other remedy than that we should 
 again be made whole and strong and full of life. There 
 is no possibility here of our dreaming of being 'let 
 off' without being changed. We can no more be let 
 off our sins than a diseased heart or a defiled blood 
 can be ignored or overlooked. Sins must be healed, 
 and probably by painful remedies. 
 
 Secondly, we may think about sin as an offence 
 against our fellow-men. Selfishness, lust, cruelty, in- 
 justice, malice, dishonesty, are wrongs against society, 
 and society is quite right in utterly repudiating any 
 idea of forgiving us these things unless we amend and 
 show a disposition to practise the contrary virtues, 
 and make what reparation lies in our power for the 
 wrong that we have done our fellow-men. There 
 ought to be no social forgiveness, except where signs 
 are shown of a new recognition of social duty. 
 
 66 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 Thirdly, we may regard sin as an offence against God. 
 The character of sin in this relationship is best under- 
 stood by the wrong which a lawless, rebellious, un- 
 grateful son does to the heart of his father and mother. 
 The hearts of the parents will yearn over their son in 
 any case, but they cannot be satisfied with anything 
 less than some sign of amendment. They will not love 
 him the less for all his outrages. But he cannot come 
 back into the fellowship of home-life (except in a 
 purely external way) unless he shows a change of 
 heart; that is, sorrow for the wrong he has done 
 and the grief he has caused, the sort of sorrow that 
 means amendment for the future — a frank recognition 
 of the laws of home, a loyal obedience to the righteous 
 will which rules there. Looking at sin in these ways, 
 we must pray, Heal our inward diseases, or, Give us a 
 new heart, or, Grant us true conversion of spirit. But 
 sin may also be regarded from a point of view which, 
 in the simplest sense, we may call legal. When a 
 man outrages another's rights, or fails to give him what 
 is his due, society holds him guilty; regards him as 
 under an obligation to restore or to make reparation. 
 And this attitude towards wrong-doing is a reflection 
 of the mind of God. Sin is an outrage upon God's 
 rights — it makes us a debtor; and the debt we can 
 never pay, because we cannot undo the wrong that we 
 have done. Thus, as sin is a debt, the only prayer we 
 can pray is that it shall be remitted : let us off o»» 
 
 67 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 debt. Are we to say that this is a shallow prayer? 
 Or, occurring as it does in the Lord's Prayer, must we 
 not alter the question, and ask, Why is this not a 
 shallow prayer ? I would answer this question thus : — 
 
 1. The petition is guarded by the place it holds in 
 the whole. We most naturally put confession of sins 
 and prayer for forgiveness at the beginning of ser- 
 vices, but it is very noticeable that in the Lord's 
 Prayer it comes at the end, and to pray the previous 
 clauses of the prayer ensures in the heart of him who 
 offers it everything that is most opposed to a shallow 
 view of forgiveness. No one who has not a changed 
 heart and a new spirit, no one who has not the gener- 
 osity and nobility of true sonship, can possibly pray 
 that God's name may be hallowed, and His kingdom 
 come, and His will be done. 
 
 2. The clause is guarded by what follows it — ' As we 
 have forgiven our debtors.' God deals with us as we 
 deal with our fellow-men. There is no possibility, 
 therefore, of this prayer allowing any one to suppose 
 that he can get God to let him off the punishment 
 of his sins and live in the divine favour, while he 
 remains selfish and ungenerous towards his fellow-men. 
 There is no mere insistence upon our rights towards 
 our fellow-men possible, so long as we retain the hope 
 that God is not going to insist on His legal rights 
 towards us. It is only merciful men who can be 
 forgiven. 
 
 68 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 3. It is evident from all our Lord's teaching in what 
 sense He would have His disciples pray to have their 
 offences forgiven. 'Whom the Lord loveth he chas- 
 teneth,' that is, whom the Lord loveth He punisheth. 
 So God is recorded by the Psalmist to have dealt with 
 His saints of old. ' Thou answerest them, O Lord our 
 God ; thou art a God that forgavest them, though thou 
 tookest vengeance of their doings.' 1 So it was with 
 1 Moses and Aaron among his priests.' Truly whom 
 the Lord loveth He punisheth. Christ Himself, so far 
 from being exempted from the punishment of human 
 sins, even though the sins were not His own, was 
 conspicuous just for this, that the Lord laid on Him 
 the iniquity of us all, that is, suffered Him to bear the 
 consequences of other men's sins. 
 
 There are, we may say, two kinds of punishment 
 for sin. There is the eternal penalty which consists 
 in alienation from God, and that is over when the 
 sinful attitude is over. But there is also the temporal 
 punishment which in the course of nature is so allotted 
 to sin as to follow naturally from it; and when we 
 are forgiven, that becomes the healing chastisement 
 which the penitent heart awaits, with trembling indeed 
 but also with joy. To have our debts remitted then 
 does not mean to be let off all the temporal chastise- 
 ment due to our sins, but to have in our hearts the 
 
 Psalm xcix. 8. 
 69 
 
Prayer, and TJie Lord's Prayer 
 
 consciousness that God has nothing against us — that as 
 He has given us a changed heart, so He has no more 
 in mind the outrages against His majesty and His love 
 of which in the past we have been guilty. 
 
 4. To confess the wrongs we have done to the 
 righteousness of God, to own that we cannot undo the 
 past, and then simply to receive of God's undeserved 
 mercy free forgiveness — this is what lays the heart 
 of man under a special sense of gratitude. There is 
 no joymlness or willingness of service more glad than 
 that of the child who has done wrong and been sorry 
 for it and has been forgiven, and experiences all the 
 rebound of gratitude and love. So the absolved sinner 
 experiences the gratitude of the emancipated heart, 
 emancipated by the simple act of the divine bounty, 
 and the gratitude can show itself in nothing but 
 service. 
 
 5. 'Forgive us our sins.' There is no forgiveness 
 for ourselves unless we are solicitous that others may 
 be forgiven too. St. John talks about the Christian 
 when ' he sees a brother sin a sin not unto death/ 
 asking God for him and thus obtaining for him the 
 bounty of a fresh gift of spiritual life. 1 Such free 
 interchange of spiritual gifts from brother to brother 
 is not possible where the sin is most grievous — where 
 it is the ' sin unto death ' ; but where it is, as we say, 
 
 » St. John v. 16. 
 70 
 
The Lords Prayer 
 
 a venial sin, there the continual sayiDg of the Lord's 
 Prayer is the winning of a continual and free remission, 
 as for our sins so for the sins of others. Would to 
 God that before we criticize any one of our fellows or 
 our superiors we would say this prayer for him and for 
 ourselves, ' Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive 
 them that trespass against us.' 
 
 Once for all the sacrifice of Christ won for men 
 acceptance with God and forgiveness of their sins. 
 Into that mystery we will not inquire. But we believe 
 that we are admitted within the scope of that forgive- 
 ness when we become members of the body of Christ. 
 Out of that holy fellowship we may indeed, by our 
 persistent wilfulness, fall. But so long as we abide 
 in it, we bask altogether in the sunshine of the for- 
 giving love, as a child under the face of his father and 
 his mother, and ' if we confess our sins, he is faithful 
 and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from 
 all unrighteousness.' 
 
 71 
 
IX 
 
 3Bvin$ us not into ^Temptation, but 
 Deliver us ttom tbe Evil ®ne 
 
 The first part of this clause has caused a certain 
 amount of difficulty to thoughtful Christians. For 
 does not St. James bid us count it all joy when we fall 
 into divers temptations, knowing that the trial of our 
 faith worketh patience ? How is it then we pray, Lead 
 us not into temptation? To this question one may 
 give a double answer. 
 
 1. It has been noticed that our Lord's prayers and 
 words in the hour of His agony before the Passion have 
 a close resemblance to some of the clauses of the Lord's 
 Prayer. * Not as I will, but as thou wilt.' ' Thy will 
 be done.' ' Watch and pray, that ye enter not into 
 temptation.' 1 And in the prayer following the Last 
 Supper, ' Sanctify (hallow) them in the truth.' ' I made 
 known unto them thy name.' 'I pray that thou 
 
 1 St. Matt. xxvi. 39-41. 
 
 72 
 
TJie Lord's Prayer 
 
 shouldest keep them from the evil one.' 1 This being 
 so, it is natural to interpret this particular clause in the 
 Lord's Prayer in the sense of * Watch and pray, that 
 ye enter not into temptation.' Temptation is there 
 treated as the punishment of the carelessness which 
 neglects to watch and pray. And from this point of 
 view we should naturally interpret 'Lead us not into 
 temptation' thus : Suffer us not to live in spiritual 
 carelessness, so that temptation should come upon us 
 as a snare to our overthrow. This is a very necessary 
 prayer. People are very frequently anxious about their 
 spiritual condition when they actually find themselves 
 engulfed in temptation, who have been utterly careless 
 in running into it. If men in general gave real thought 
 to their truest welfare, it would be impossible for them 
 to pay so little attention to possible spiritual results in 
 making their great choices, such as determine largely 
 the future of their lives. Thus men rush into a profes- 
 sion generally from no other point of view than that of 
 whether it is likely to pay. Afterwards they find that 
 their profession subjects their purity or their tem- 
 perance or their honesty to a strain which is too much 
 for it, and they are full of what is partly complaint and 
 partly horror. But it might all have been foreseen and 
 guarded against, if, before the choice of their pro- 
 fession, they had prayed the prayer, ' Lead us not into 
 
 1 St. John xvii. 11, 15, 26. 
 73 
 
Prayer, and The Lords Prayer 
 
 temptation/ Exactly the same consideration applies to 
 investing money or to getting married. They are steps 
 which in different degrees involve a man's life in new 
 conditions ; and unless he is spiritually a fool, he will 
 ' look ' well ' before he leaps ' what bearing his new 
 conditions will have upon his life towards God. Exactly 
 the same truth applies to our reading. It is all very 
 well to determine not to be narrow in the literature we 
 read, all very well to know the ways of the world, and 
 to ascertain what people who are not Christians have to 
 say for themselves and against our Creed ; but if there 
 is such a thing as spiritual temptation, and a personal 
 responsibility to preserve our innocence and our faith, 
 it is quite certain that there is a way of embarking in 
 the literature of sin and the literature of unbelief which 
 is precisely like walking into an enemy's country in 
 time of war unarmed and unprepared. To pray, ' Lead 
 us not into temptation/ then, involves a corresponding 
 course of action in preparing ourselves against it. 
 
 2. But, after all, this explanation of the clause does 
 not exhaust its meaning. It may be God's will that we 
 should not have our daily bread, and yet we have just 
 prayed for it in a previous clause. Thus also it may be 
 God's will that we should be tempted and tried, and yet 
 we may pray that it may not be necessary. We may 
 then, perhaps, paraphrase the prayer — Father, if it be 
 possible, let the cup of temptation pass from me with- 
 out my drinking it. Some temptation is necessary for 
 
 74 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 us, but this or that particular temptation may not be 
 necessary, and it may only need a little prayer to enable 
 us to escape it. The wise man knows that he is weak. 
 He can fight, indeed, when fighting is required of him, 
 and find his strength in God ; but he will not run into 
 temptation if he can avoid it. He will pray, for others 
 as for himself, ' Lead us not into temptation.' 
 
 II 
 
 And all this precaution is necessary because, as 
 St. Paul says, ■ we wrestle not against flesh and blood, 
 but against principalities, against powers, against the 
 world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces 
 of wickedness in heavenly places.' x In other words, the 
 temptations that come from visible and tangible sources 
 draw their strength from a source which is unseen. 
 Behind visible foes there is an invisible ; behind the 
 visible opposition of evil men there is an invisible prince 
 of darkness and an unseen host of fallen spirits in- 
 truding themselves into the highest things, into the 
 heavenly places. I am quite sure that our Lord speaks 
 so confidently and so frequently of the existence of evil 
 spirits that a sober Christian cannot doubt their reality, 
 
 Eph. vi. 12. 
 75 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 and I feel sure also, that their existence interprets a 
 good deal which would otherwise be unintelligible in 
 our spiritual experience. When thoughts of poisonous 
 evil, distinct and vivid, are shot into our mind, like 
 suggestions from a bad companion ; when a tempest of 
 pride and rebellion against God surges over our soul ; 
 when voices of discouragement and despair tell us that 
 it is no use trying, and that human nature is hopelessly 
 bad ; when a sinful course of action presents itself to us 
 in a wholly false aspect until we have committed our- 
 selves to it, and then strips off its disguises and shows 
 itself in its true colours, in its ugliness, in its treachery, 
 in its infamy — in all such experiences we do well to 
 remember that, besides the weakness or pollution of 
 our own flesh, and besides the solicitations of the world, 
 there is ' the adversary/ ' the devil/ that is, the slanderer 
 of God and of our human nature and the 'father of 
 lies/ actually at work to seduce our wills and sophisti- 
 cate our intelligences. Moral evil, let us never forget, 
 exists nowhere except in rebellious wills, human or 
 diabolic ; and however great the mystery which wraps 
 the ultimate destiny of such rebellious wills, at least 
 we know that their power will have an end, that they 
 will be put manifestly and openly under the feet of 
 Christ, and that the power which by prayer we win 
 here and now, suffices on each occasion to give us 
 strength to triumph againt the devil, as well as the 
 world and the flesh, even as Christ triumphed. For 
 
 76 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 'this is the victory that overcometh the world, even 
 our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but 
 he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God ? ' Yes, 
 God ' will not suffer us on any occasion to be tempted 
 above that we are able, but will with the temptation 
 also make a way to escape, that we may be able to 
 bear it.' 1 
 
 1 John v. 4 ; 1 Cor. x. 13. 
 
 77 
 
[jfor TTbine is tbe Ifctngfcom, tbe power 
 ant) tbe Glory, for £x>er an& J6ver] 
 
 These words do not form part of the original text of 
 the Lord's Prayer. They are omitted accordingly in 
 the Revised Version of St. Matt. vi. 13. A doxology, 
 however, closely similar to this was attached to the 
 Lord's Prayer, in the custom of Syrian Christians, 
 before the end of the first century. It is based on 
 David's doxology * : ' Thine, O Lord, is the . . . power, 
 and the glory, and . . . the kingdom,' and it -expresses 
 nobly indeed the reason why we pray. God our Father, 
 who is in heaven, has, in spite of all that appears to the 
 contrary, always and everywhere the kingdom, and the 
 power, and the glory. Whatever royalty or power or 
 glory the kingdom of evil seems to have to our eyes, as 
 we contemplate the prevalence of lust and worldliness 
 and cruelty and selfishness all around us, is in truth 
 
 1 1 Chron. xxix. 11. 
 78 
 
The Lord's Prayer 
 
 but a transitory show, like the imposing glory of 
 Nebuchadnezzar's image of gold in the plain of Dura, 
 of the province of Babylon. There is no real power in 
 it, because its doom is spoken and its overthrow is 
 certain. Therefore there is only one true refuge and 
 strength, and that is God, and only one thing worth 
 having, and that is the life according to God, the life of 
 the Kingdom of God. 
 
 II 
 
 I have come to the end of this brief explanation of 
 the Lord's Prayer, and I would not add anything, were 
 it not that I have just read in the newspaper a remark- 
 able instance of the difference which I spoke of in an 
 earlier paper between the prayer of instinct and the 
 prayer which is in the name of Christ — the Lord's 
 Prayer. It is well known that Australian primary 
 education has been, speaking generally, purely secular. 
 But recently a much-beloved inspector in South 
 Australia was lying on his death-bed, and an anonymous 
 advertisement in the newspapers, addressed to school- 
 masters, brought it about that one minute before or 
 after regular school hours on a certain day, the children 
 were assembled and requested to repeat off a black- 
 board the words, ' Our Father which art in heaven, 
 
 79 
 
Prayer, and The Lord's Prayer 
 
 grant that our dear master and beloved friend . . . may 
 be restored to health/ Now such a prayer is a remark- 
 able instance of the way in which at any time of 
 imminent calamity the human instinct of prayer will 
 re-assert itself. But it is also a proof that the human 
 instinct does not reach to the point of offering the 
 prayer in Christ's name. The prayer of human instinct 
 is always, 'Give me to-day what I so sorely want,' 
 whereas the prayer which is in the name of Christ 
 starts always from God 's point of view, and puts the 
 special need of the individual, of the class, of the 
 country, in its true subordination to the will of God 
 and to the interest of His kingdom. A detached 
 prayer for something we want, apart from any wider 
 or diviner point of view, can never be a prayer in the 
 name of Christ. 
 
 May the good God teach us all to pray the Lord's 
 Prayer — and the whole of it — with heart and will and 
 intelligence and voice, in private and in public, in 
 Eucharist and in penitence, for ourselves, for the whole 
 Church, and for all mankind. For he who is ever truly 
 learning to say the Lord's Prayer cannot be far from the 
 kingdom of Heaven, and to say it perfectly is to be in 
 truth a heavenly being already. 
 
 WELLS GARDNER, DARTON AND CO., PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS. 
 
 <fc 
 
Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries 
 
 1 1012 01173 9580 
 
 ; DATE DUE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Demco. Inc. 38-293