BV230 .F24 THE LORD'S PRAYER THE V NOV 2 9 19] LORD'S PRAYER Sermons preacbeD In McBtrntnater abbes BY THEJVERY REV. FREDERIC W. FARRAR D.D. F.R.S. Dean of Canterbury Late Fellmu of Trinity College Cambringe Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen LONDON ISBISTER AND COMPANY Limited 15 & i6 TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN 1895 PREFACE 'T^HESE Sermons on tlie Lord's Prayer wei-e preached in Westminster Abbey, with the exception of two or three delivered in St. Margaret's, Westminster. They are of the plainest and simplest character, written from week to week as duty re- quired. I had no intention of publishing them, and in allowing them to appear in this form I yield to considerable pressure, partly because I have reason to hope that they were found useful by many when they were delivered, and partly because they were taken down in shorthand and have been printed by others without permission and with imperfect accuracy. They make no pretensions to depth, originality, or literary finish, but aim simply and solely at religious edification. T can no longer trace back to their source many vi PREFACE of the thoughts, and possibly even some of the expressions, which occur in them. I was chiefly indebted to the works on the Lord's Prayer by Bishop Andrewes, Dr. Isaac Barrow, Archbishop Leighton, and Professor P. D. Maurice. It is certain, too, that I must have derived valuable hints from the Sermons and Addresses of my friends the Dean of Llandaff and Dr. Newman Hall. F. W. I'ARRAR. CONTENTS AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN HALLOWED BE THY NAME THY KINGDOM COME .... THY WILL BE DONE .... GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES . AS WE FORGIVE THEM THAT TRESPASS AGAINST U AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL I. 11. III. IV. FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM . THE POWER AND THE GLORY . rOR EVER AND EVER AMEN. I II S PAnn 9 27 41 55 71 89 107 127 147 165 181 199 213 227 ?43 255 271 ~^7 / AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE "After this manner pray ye." — Matthew vi. 9. THE more the years pass on, the deeper be- comes my conviction that religion does not mean, and has little to do with, many things it is taken to mean. It does not mean elaborate theo- logies ; it does not mean membership of this or that organisation ; it does not depend on orthodoxy in matters of opinion respecting which Christians differ. It means "a good heart and a good life." Bight conduct, a holy character — these are the tests of the only sort of religion which is of the smallest value. All else will vanish ; this will remain. Of the many lies which God's fiery finger will "shrivel from the souls of men," all sorts of religious shams, unrealities, human systems, shibboleths, and accretions to the pure truth of His Gospel will be the most numerous. Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance — these are the only fruits of the Tree of Life which are genuine ; and the glossy 12 THE LORD'S PRAYER leaves of arrogant Pharisaism are leaves for the poisoning — not for the healing — of the nations. With this conviction, during the last months of my residence as Canon, I did not choose any recon- dite subjects on which to speak to you, but chose the old, simple, majestic voice of Sinai, the Ten Words which comprise all the grandeur of the moral law. God's revelations fall under the two heads of the Law and the Gospel. The Law alone — holy as it is, and just and good — carries with it no power to secure our obedience. The voice of its archangelic trumpet, for sinners such as we are, does but shatter the darkness with menaces of doom. But Christ came with His Gospel to deliver us from the curse of the Law; to secure us forgiveness for its past violation; to inspire us with strength for future faithfulness. The forgiveness was procured by Christ's sacrifice ; the strength was inspired by His Spirit. The chief means whereby we can avail our- selves of both is prayer. That we should be allowed to pray, that access to God should thus be given us in Christ, is the most priceless boon granted to our humanity. I shall not waste time over theoretic difficulties which the sceptic may suggest about prayer. The instincts and the needs of humanity tear the difficulties of sceptics to shreds, and fling them to the winds. The voice of God in the heart of man imperiously AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE 13 bids him to make his requests known unto God. Yes, and let the sceptic himself but once be plunged into the waves and storms of calamity, and he belies his own negations, and pours out prayers which he cannot help to the God in whom he refuses to believe. It is told of Thistlewood, the Cato Street conspirator, that after arguing against the existence of a God, the moment he was left alone he was heard to fling himself on his knees in his prison cell in a passion of entreaty, and that on the scaffold he poured out the agonised supplication, '* God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul ! " It would be superfluous to argue with any one of you about the need of prayer, for there is not one of you who has not felt it. Rather let me remind you. Christian men and women, of the duty of prayer, since God bids us pray to Him ; and of the dignity of prayer, since therein the Almighty admits us, who are but dust and ashes, through Christ, into His very audience-chamber ; and of the necessity for prayer, seeing that without it all our religious life will fade, as surely as the flowers on which no dew falls; and of the consolation of prayer, by which alone we can cast our burden upon the Lord. And let me remind you of the reflex benefits of prayer upon ourselves. Prayer, as St. Augustine says, brightens the heart and purges it for the acceptance of the gifts of heaven. Prayer strengthens the 14 THE LORD'S PRAYER faith from whicli it springs ; it gives to hope its airaKupa^oKia, the stretching out of the neck, the standing a-tiptoe in earnest expectation ; it kindles love to a purer and brighter flame. All Christian graces come to us through prayer. These benefits of ^^I'^yer speak for themselves. Nor need I detain you long by telling you what prayer is. I could not tell you anything better than what holy souls have said of it. Prayer, so wrote one of the saints of God in his private diary, is " want felt; help desired; faith to obtain that help." '' Prayer," says another, " is helplessness casting itself upon power ; it is misery seeking peace ; it is unholiness embracing purity ; it is hatred desiring love. Prayer is corruption panting for immortality ; it is the eagle soaring heavenward ; it is the dove returning home; it is the prisoner pleading for release; it is the mariner steering for the haven amid the dangerous storm ; it is the soul, oppressed by the world, escaping to the empyrean, and bathing its ruffled plumes in the ethereal and the divine." Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, Uttered or unexpressed ; The motion of a hidden fire, That trembles in the breast. Prayer is the burthen of a sigh, The falling of a tear, The upward glancing of an eye When none but God is near. AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE 15 Prayer is the Christian's vital breath, The Christian's native air ; His watchword at the gates of death, He enters heaven with prayer. Now, because prayer is a thing so blessed, and so necessary, let me urge on every person here present the message of our Lord, that they ought always to pray and not to faint. A Christian who does not pray is a dead Christian. He is not — he cannot be — a true Christian at all. For he violates the most imperious instinct, and flings away the chiefest blessing of the Christian life. He becomes like a man who is blind and lame, and who yet, though his path lies amid stumbling-blocks and precipices, flings away his crutch and drives away his guide. Oh ! I fear that many, after their childish years, abandon the habit of prayer altogether, to the fatal injury of all peace with God. And that is the reason why we see so many evil, so many disordered, so many absolutely depraved lives ; that is the reason why the world is so full of misery and wickedness, and the Church so full of pettiness and malice. Oh ! if it be true of any of you that you no longer open the day and close the night with prayer, hear from my lips the call of God, that ere you be left fatally to yourselves you should resume it. Begin this very day. Do not retire to rest this night till you have knelt before the God of your life, and asked Him, i6 THE LORD'S PRAYER for His dear Son's sake, to forgive all your neglect, all your backsliding, all your wickedness. It may be the very saving of your soul. You will find an in- finite blessedness in doing so. If you come to your Saviour, He will receive you graciously, He will love you freely. Is not this the very reason why God makes prayer so incredibly easy to us ? " Every time, place, posture," it has been truly said, is easy. " Talent is not needful ; eloquence is out of place ; dignity is no recommendation. Our want is our eloquence, our misery our recommendation. Thought is quick as lightning, and quick as lightning can it multiply effectual prayer. Prayer needs no cere- monies ; rubrics are childishness to it. The whole function is simply this : a child, a wandering child, comes to its Father, and pleads for grace and pity, for forgiveness and for help." But now, just because God has made prayer so easy, because it is of such vital importance, Satan — God's enemy and ours — does his utmost to ruin for us this gift of God. And this he does in two ways. He diverts us from prayer ; he tries to pervert our prayer itself into sin. First, he diverts us from prayer. He knows that, if he can succeed in that, we are his slaves. He makes us too proud to pray ; he suggests doubts of AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE 17 the usefulness of prayer ; he crowds prayer out of our lives with earth's follies and emptiness ; he whispers to us that we are too wicked to pray ; he tells us that there will be time enough to pray when passion is dead and youth is over. Ah, my friends, be not ignorant of his devices ! This is Satan's way of lulling you to fatal security, of robbing you of your armour, of keeping you defenceless amid fierce temp- tations and sundry kinds of death. He knows well that either praying will make you leave off sinning, in which case you are delivered out of his snares; or that sinning will make you leave off praying, in which case, unless God in His mercy pluck you as a brand out of the burning, you will be saved only as by fire. Now Christ does not contemplate the possibility of a Christian who has ceased to pray ; such a Christian is in God's sight no Christian; but He warns us of the other danger, that Satan, if he cannot divert our prayers, will do his utmost to pervert them. And on this head He gave two warnings : one against idle verbiage ; the other against hypocritic formality. "In praying," He said, " use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do." The Hindoo fakir will spend all day in repeating over and over again the name of his deity. The Buddhist bonze thinks that there is salvation in the endless repetition of his magic formula. The i8 THE LORD'S PRAYER Mussulman will interlard his commonest, and even his wickedest speech, with endless parentheses of " God is great," " God is compassionate." The ignorant Eomanist repeats his Aves and his FaUrs, dropping a bead with every Paternoster. God bears compassionately with our fooleries, but in itself this, and all that our Lord calls (daTToXoyia and TToXvXoyia — is mere stuttering, and the tumbling out of empty words. And at last prayer becomes degraded into a fetishistic mechanism, and the Tartar thinks that he offers so many thousand prayers with every clatter of his prayer-mill. Long prayers, even repeated prayers, may have their place. St. Augustine tells us that he spent all the night in the single prayer, Noverim te, Domine ; noverim me ("0 Lord, may I know Thee ! may I know myself ! ") Such a prayer does not break our Lord's command, so long as the prayer continues to be intense and fervent. Our Lord sometimes spent whole nights in prayer ; and in Gethsemane He prayed thrice over, using the same words. But the moment a prayer becomes a mechanical weariness, the moment the lips repeat it but the heart cannot follow, it ceases to be a prayer, and becomes a mockery. " What God requires and looks at," says Bishop Hall, " is neither the arithmetic of our prayers, — how many they are ; nor the rhetoric of our prayers, — how eloquent they AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE 19 be; nor the geometry of our prayers, — how long they be ; nor the music of our prayers, — how sweet our voice may be; nor the logic, nor the method, nor even the orthodoxy of our prayers " ; but the one thing which avails is ferventness and sincerity. Long Sunday services, endless daily services, may be, and often become, an idle waste of time, or mere superstitious and mechanical functions. The most effectual prayers which Scripture records were the very briefest : " God be merciful to me the sinner ! " ; " Lord, what wouldst Thou have me to do ? " " Lord Jesus, receive my spirit ! " Do not let us deceive ourselves as to the value of outward forms. They may be mere bodily exer- cise; they may represent neither true Christian work nor any fraction of furtherance of the king- dom of heaven. They may only deaden us into spiritual torpor and inflate us with Pharisaic pride. Few, very few — none but God's truest saints — can make long prayers; and when our Lord gave His model prayer, saying, " Thus pray ye," knowing our wants, knowing our nature, knowing our sole capa- bilities. His model was brevity itself. Prayer is no bare huddle of ceremonies, or heaping up of formal words in empty churches. Be they hurriedly babbled, or be they unctuously droned, or be they pompously rolled forth, they may be no more than the idle speaking and much speaking against which Christ 20 THE LORD'S PRAYER warns us. Far better that our prayers should only occupy five minutes and be sincere, rising like incense through the golden censer of our one and only Priest, Christ Jesus, than that they should be a spiritless mummery, or that they should resemble the idle vaunt of the Pharisee,— a prayer kindled with the strange fire of pride, which stank to heaven. "Thus pray ye," said Christ, and therefore any other manner must be a wrong manner. Now, in subsequent sermons I propose God helping me, to study with you the Lord's Prayer, clause by clause ; convinced, as I said, that in these divine and simple formulae — in the Lord's Prayer, in the Sermon on the Mount, in the Ten Commandments, in the Apostles' Creed — we shall find, over and over again, more truth, more orthodoxy, more divinity, more spiritual eleva- tion and comfort, than in all the voluminous instruc- tion which teaches for doctrines the commandments of men. Why need we worry ourselves and the poor simple souls of God's children with the intolerable and in- terminable prolixities of party opinionativeness and controversial dogmatism ? What avails it to magnify the non-essential, altering the whole perspective of the New Testament, substituting mediaeval corrup- tions for Gospel truths, and confusing men's con- sciences by the invention of artificial sins, when we see all around us that these developments may be as AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE 21 alien as possible from even the most elementary of Christian graces ? If we are deceived by pretension and nullities it is our own fault. After all the mischief that priests and systems have done, nothing is simpler than true religion. It is the way of holi- ness, in which not even the fool need err. It is to serve God with all our heart. So Christ taught. He said that the golden rule of love comprised all the I^aw and the Prophets. What does the Lord require of any one of us ? To do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God : that and nothing more. So teaches the Old Testament. How are we to enter into life ? Christ's answer to the question was : Keep the Commandments. Go to Him, confess to Him, ask of Him, and you need never be misled by the vain teaching of erring men. And as you have heard two of His warnings about this infinitely important duty of prayer, so hear these other warn- ings of which His Word is full. First, remember God will hear no wicked prayer. Men have been known to ask God for what they would not dare to ask men. The Hindoo Thug prays to his goddess that his murders may be accomplished. The Italian bandit thanks the Virgin for the success of his raid. In the heathen satirist, the hypocrite prays to Laverna that he may deceive successfully, and that men may think him holy and just. Against such prayers I need hardly warn you. They are as if a man offered swine's flesh upon the altar. 22 THE LORD'S PRAYER But we all need mucli more an earnest warning against selfish and earthly prayers. Of all the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer, one only is for the simplest of earthly needs, and even in that the heavenly is mingled with the earthly. We may mention to God our earthly desires, but never without the two humble provisos : Only if it be good for me ; only if it be Thy will. For, as the heathen poet says, "The gods have overthrown whole houses at their own desire " ; and as our own Shakspeare sings : We, ignorant of ourselves, Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers Deny us for our good ; so find we profit By losing of our prayers. Nothing is a more paltry abuse of prayer than the mean and selfish pestering of God with " undue and unworthy suits." " Allah," prayed the Mussulman, '* I want a hundred sequins. Just a hundred sequins, neither more nor less. Allah, give me a hundred sequins ! " If that be all a man has to ask of God, he might just as well not ask at all. Far better is it, as even pagans have taught, to feel that man is dearer to God than to himself, and to ask Him only to supply our deepest needs. The poet was versify- ing: a sentence of Plato when he wrote : o Not what we wish, but what we wantf Thy bounteous grace supply : The good, unasked, in mercy grant ; The illf though asked, deny. AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE 23 Lastly, as we should hate wicked prayers and shun foolish and futile prayers, let us never forget that our prayers are as we are. The prayer of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord. By the prayer of the wicked is not meant for a moment the prayer of sinners who come as sinners, desiring to sin no more ; but the prayer of the wicked, in the midst of wicked- ness, who do not mean to abandon that wickedness. The prayer of men who vainly try to deceive God as well as themselves — of men who go on still in their wickedness, of men who want to serve God and Mammon, to worship Christ and yet keep all their own vilest idols — that is an abomination to the Lord. If we come to God with a sin upon our conscience, and do not mean to abandon that sin ; if the cheat- ing tradesman calls his family to prayers but does not mean to give up his adulterations and frauds, his false balances and deceitful weights ; if a man kneels to God with his heart full of raging malice and hatred, and has not the slightest intention to be just to his opponents, his very prayer is but a sin, which adds deeper blackness to his other sins. If a man has merely touched an unclean insect and thrown it away, say the Kabbis, the smallest drop of water is sufficient to purify him ; but if he holds the creeping thing in his hand, defilement will continue to cleave to him though he use for lustration all the waters of the §ea. Even so is the man who prays that his sin may 24 THE LORD'S PRAYER be pardoned and yet does not mean to renounce it. St. Augustine tells us, in his " Confessions," how, when a youth, he was miserably entangled in the lusts of the flesh, and prayed to God to deliver him, secretly hoping that God would not hear him just yet, in order that he might sin a little longer. Ah ! such a prayer as that is worse than valueless; it is blasphemous : and as for its being heard, a man might as well pray (as the Eussian writer says they mostly do pray) that two and two may not make four. No uninspired writer has illustrated this awful truth with more force than our own Shakspeare in his " Hamlet." There the murderous, adulterous king kneels down to pray. Not even he, observe, would be in the least too bad to pray; not even the prodigal, so he have but left the far country vvith its husks and swine, will be rejected at the throne of grace. And this the bad king feels. *' What," he says : What if this cursed hand Were thicker than itself in brother's blood, Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens To wash it white as snow ? Whereto serves mercy But to confront the visage of offence 1 But then he is at once met by the fatal fact that remorse and misery are not repentance, and that he does not repent since he still meapei to keep his sin. AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE 25 O, what form of prayer Can serve my turn 7 " Forgive me my foul murther " 7 That cannot be ; since I am still possessed Of those effects for which I did the murther, My crown, mine own ambition and my queen. May one be pardoned and retain the offence 7 Ah, no ! for ever and for ever no ! And so, though he still remains upon his knees, he soon finds that his prayer is but a hollow mockery, and rising, he sighs aloud : My words fly up, my thoughts remain below ; Words without thoughts never to heaven go. Ah, my friends, it is for this reason that prayer may be so infinite a boon to you. Satan trembles when he sees not only "the weakest saint," but even the vilest sinner, "on his knees." He knows that the sinner is escaping him, if it can be said of him " Behold, he prayeth." Prayer is God's own anti- dote for sin. It is God's means of our gaining that gift of the Holy Spirit which can sanctify us from sin. It is God's means of applying to our souls indi- vidually that forgiveness of sins which Christ lived and died to gain for all our race. Ah ! offer not the prayer of the wicked, but the prayer of the humble publican, the prayer of the penitent prodigal, and then be sure that it will be granted. For it is Christ Himself who invites us. " Come unto me," He says, " all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will refresh you ; " and " Him that cometh unto Me, I will in no wise cast out." OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN "Our Father which art in heaven." — St. Matthew vi. 9. MANY of you, perhaps, think that you know all that can be said about a theme so simple as the Lord's Prayer. My friends, I doubt whether the greatest and most learned of us has mastered so much as a fragment of what we may learn from it. Unlike the puerilities and pettinesses of human dogmatism, these great eternal words of the Son of God are unfathomable as the deep. Its surface may flash with a network of sunbeams in innumerable laughter; but what does the gilded shallop which glides over its summer calm know of the might of its billows or the majesty of its storms ? Its wave- lets may break in rippling music at our feet ; but what does the child who plays beside them guess of its unseen abysses, and of the whole swing of the ocean on which tbose tiny rippling waves depend ? " The Paternoster," says Maurice, " is not, as some fancy, the easiest, most natural of all devout utterances. It may be committed to memory 30 THE LORD'S PRAYER quickly, but it is slowly learned by heart. Men may repeat it over ten times in an hour, but to know what it means, not to contradict it in the very mom mt of praying it, not to construct our prayers upon the model most unlike it, that is hard." Yes, it is hard, for it requires the spiritual mind. Sen- suous forms of worship ar^^ cheap and easy, but it takes almost an angel to worship God in spirit and in truth. Have we ever realised how infinite was the im- portance of the request, how supreme the boon of its concession, when the Apostles said : " Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples"? Here is no earthly teacher speaking, no petty, human theologian, but God Himself teaching us how to pray to God. Deep should be our gratitude that this example of prayer is so plain that a little one can utter it, so profound that not the wisest of us all can fully explore its hidden treasures. But how awfully anxious should we be to catch at least the keynote which is struck by the Son of God to show us the manner in which we should make our approach to God! That keynote is struck in this address : " Our Father which art in heaven." It teaches us on the very threshold of prayer to com- pose our hearts before Him, to check the idle roving of our thoughts, to serve the Ijord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN 31 " Our Father which art in heaven.''^ " Which art." He who cometh to God must believe that He f is. Yet how many of us really believe that God is ; ' that our Kves are passed in His presence ; that He is a besetting God ; that His eye sees us always ; that He is " of purer eyes than to behold iniquity " ; that when we kneel down on our knees before Him we enter the very audience chamber of the King of kings ? Oh ! is it such a nothing that this awful, eternal, infinite God suffers us to take refuge with Him from the worthlessness of the world and the baseness of our own hearts ? When we remember all our sins and shames, when our iniquities take such hold upon us that we are not able to look up ; or when, on the other hand, our hearts are full of coldness and insolence, do the words of Joshua never flash upon our memory : " Ye cannot serve God, for He is a holy God, He is a jealous God; He will not forgive your transgression nor your sins " ? Do we never contrast them with the forgiving love which taught us to say, " Our Father " ? And " Which art in heaven : " more accurately, " in the heavens." " In heaven," not as limited thereto by local space, but as manifested therein among the holy spirits whom He loves. The heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him. Heaven is every- where where He is. Sursurifi corda — Lift up your hearts ! 32 THE LORD'S PRAYER " Wliat is this we find in ourselves," asks Leigliton, " that makes ns so drunk with self-conceit, not only in our converse one with another, but with God? Surely we know Him not ; at least we consider not who He is, where He dwells ; who we are, and where we dwell. Surely it would lay us low if, when we come before God, we would consider Him as the most glorious King sitting on His throne, compassed with glorious spirits -, and we ourselves coming before Him as base frogs, creeping out of our pond where we dwell amidst the mire of sinful pollutions." By this great addition God would prevent us from mingling our prayers with the impertinences of frivolity and the senselessness of babbling repetitions. But in this way also He would uplift our nothingness into His sublimity. It compresses into three words the great verse of Isaiah : " Thus saith the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy : I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also " (a marvellous * also ' !) ''that is of a broken and humble spirit " : — " the highest heavens are the habitation of His glory, and the humble heart hath the next honour to be the habitation of His grace." And thus we see that reverence is the keynote of the prayer taught us by the Son of God Himself. How, save with reverence, can we approach the God who chargeth even His angels with folly, and in whose sight the very heavens are not clean? We OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN 33 are told of the briglit Seraphim that each of them had six wings. " With twain he covered his face, with twain he covered his feet, and with twain did he fly." It is in awful reverence that the bright and blameless faces are veiled with those silver wings and feathers like gold. Petty, conceited, ill-mannered irreverence — irreverence of men and women in their demeanour in the Church of God — is always a mark of a vulgar and a shallow nature. No noble nature yet was ever irreverent. The spirit of reverence to God, and to the place where His honour dwelleth, is the mark of the starry spirits before His sapphire- coloured throne; and they in God's presence veil their faces with their wings. House-flies, too, have wings, such as they are, and the house-fly is the type of im^Dudent conceit which honours nothing but its worthless self, and which buzzes with equal noise and equal self-satisfaction about the crown of a king or the forehead of a martyr burning at the stake. Like that wretched insect is he or she whose chattering and giggling emptiness carries even into God's pre- sence and worship the pertness of the popinjay or the brutal swagger of a churl. Now, we shall be always wise to learn of the greatest intellects -, and Dante, the supreme poet of Catholicism — " soul awful, if this world has ever held an awful soul " — seized with accurate intuition this keynote of the Lord's Prayer. He saw in it the 34 THE LORD'S PRAYER eternal rebuke of that pride which is at once the commonest and most fatal of human sins. In Dante's Purgatorio, after he and his guide have climbed the three steps — ^the white step of sincerity, the dark purple step of contrition, the flaming step of love — to stand before the angel of penitence on the diamond threshold which typifies Christ's merits — after they have passed through the wicket-gate, they come to the lowest of the seven narrow terraces which run round the Mountain of Purgatory. It is the terrace of pride, and is carved with Divine examples of humility. Here they see a great multitude advancing towards them, bent down to earth under the weight of heavy rocks, and reminding Dante as they crawl along of the corbels in Gothic buildings bent double under the weight of superincumbent columns, their knees touching their breasts, and seeming to say, with tears, " More I cannot bear." And as he sees them in vision, and thinks of the shallow conceit of men on earth, Dante exclaims : " haughty Christians, wretched, heavy laden, weak in mental vision, per- ceive ye not that we are but worms born to bring forth the angelic butterfly that soars unclothed to judgment ? Why are your souls so puffed up with pride? Ye are but as insects, as yet but half complete, whose formation is defective." And then, as these once proud, but now half-crushed, spirits crawl towards him in their penitence, he hears that OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN 35 they are chanting a paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer as part of their discipline. They had learnt and said it in their childhood ; and now they have to become once more as little children, and repeat it in the fulness of its meaning, making of every single clause an act of submission and humility. The besetting sin of Dante himself was pride, and in the Lord's Prayer he had found, as we may find, the antidote against it. But if the words " Which art in heaven " are meant to strike the keynote of reverence, the words " Our Father " give us the dominant notes of trustfulness and love. It was said of the Emperor Augustus that they who dared to speak to him rashly, failed to appreciate his greatness, but that they who, out of fear, dared not speak to him at all, knew not how good he was. So it is with God. He wishes us to be reverent, but not abject. We are but dust and ashes; yet He suffers — nay, urges us — to come to Him. As unworthy sons — as prodigals — ^yes ! but still as sons. He invites us to call Him Father. By this title our humbleness is uplifted into sublimity. "Brethren, behold what manner of love the Father has manifested to us, that we should be called children of God : Yet such we are," for He has Himself sanctioned this "immense pretension." This Father- hood of God was the most central, the most essential part of the revelation which Christ came to give. 36 THE LORD'S PRAYER The sense of " Father " here is far deeper than that in which the word was used by the heathen of God as our Creator; far deeper than that in which the Jews used it of Jehovah as the Covenant God of their race. Those privileges of natural and Covenant relation have been made fruitless by our sins. The word "Father" here is a witness and appeal to the Incarnation. It means the Fatherhood which we may claim as brethren of God's only-begotten Son. It means the Fatherhood, not only by generation, but by regeneration ; not of birth, but of the new birth. The deeper is our holiness the more inexhaustibly divine the word "Father" becomes to us. If we could utter it aright earth would become a heaven. " As many as received Him to them gave He the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on His name." When Christ said, "I go to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God," the words were not exactly as we render them. It was Trphg tov waripa fiov KoX warepa vfiow : " To the Father of Me, and Father of you." ** First of Me," says Bishop Pearson, "then of you. Not, therefore. His because ours, but therefore ours because His." And it is remarkable that, though Christ taught us to say " our Father," He never used that form Himself, but spoke of God as ^^the Father," as " My Father," and " yoicr Father " ; but never of OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN 37 *' our Father," because, among all the sons o£ God, there is none like to that one Son of God. Nor is the address " Our Father " a witness to the Incarnation only, but also to Pentecost. " As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God." If you are led by the Spirit of God, neither sect, nor Church, nor party, nor system, nor any unauthorised intrusions and usurpations of men as feeble as yourselves, can bar your happy access to His immediate presence. You need none to introduce you but Christ, none to intercede for you but Christ, none to absolve you but Christ : Yes, one unquestioned text we read, All doubt beyond, all fear above ; Nor crackling pile, nor cursing creed, Can burn or blot it : God is love. Only, remember that vast privileges involve im- mense duties. "If I be a Father," says God to you, " where is Mine honour ? " If you be living to the flesh, if you be living the life of polluted and selfish animalism, if you are one of those depraved, dissolute, selfish, conceited, untrustworthy, malig- nant creatures, of whom, alas ! the world is so full, and have no will to abandon that vile life, how can you call God Father ? It is not as animals, not as \ beasts, that we are His children, but only as re- deemed and spiritual beings. Oh, every time that we claim as our Father Him who is eternal in the 38 THE LORD'S PRAYER heavens, remember that the title should overwhelm us with shame and confusion unless we utter it in memory of His own warning: "Be ye holy, for I am holy." There remains one word more — no less rich in meaning than are the rest — it is the word " Our." It is a protest against that selfishness which is so ing-rained in our nature that it tends to intrude even into our holiest things. We are not to pray " My Father," for God is only the Father of each as He is the Father of all. Were it not so, we should be often tempted to carry our arrogant exclusiveness and our selfish monopolies even into our prayers. Nay, but they must be extended not only as wide as the communion of saints, but as the human race. This prayer is vast as charity itself. God will not have us in our collective conceit — our conceit of Churchmanship or of opinion — any more than in our individual conceit, try vainly to make for our- selves enclosures in His universal heaven. He will not suffer us, because we belong to this fold, or hold these opinions, to assert any preferential claims to His many mansions. Is it hard for you when you pray " Our Father " to include in that prayer all who hate you without a cause ; all who slandei and undermine you ; all who are champions of causes which, you believe to be steeped in falsity; all who in their arrogance treat you as though OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN 39 you were dust beneath their feet ; all whose vanity and opinionativeness come into rude collision with your own; all the wrong-doers who make the life of men more wicked and more miserable ? Yes, in the very highest exercise of your lives you miost associate yourselves with them. You cannot speak for yourself without also speaking for them. You dare not carry your own sins, which so deeply need forgiveness, before God's throne of grace, without also carrying theirs. The word " Our " is indissolubly joined with the word " Father." The prayer is, in one word, a Paternoster, and the name "Father" loses its significance for us individually when we will not use it as the . members of a family. See, then, how deep is the meaning in this prayer. Its first word, " Our," is a plea for the universal brotherhood of our race, and for our universal charity towards even those brethren of whom we are tempted to think most unkindly and most con- temptuously. The word "Father" is the appeal of love, reminding us, not only of our creation, but also of our re-creation, of our brotherhood with the incarnate Christ, of His Spirit shed abroad in our hearts, whereby we cry " Abba, Father." The words "Which art in heaven," temper with humility and solemn reverence our new friendship and filial relation with God. Who is suflficient for these things ? How can we 40 THE LORD'S PRAYER utter even this brief preface to the prayer aright ? My friends, every one of us can in his measure utter it aright whose heart is loving and htumble. Not the bragging Pharisee ; not the domineering Church- man ; not the hard hater and despiser of his brother sinners in the great family of God ; but the little child, the ignorant, weeping prodigal, the simple, repentant publican, the forsaken beggar in the streets; and yet not even the soul of a Dante or a Milton — nay, not even the burning Cherubim and Seraphim of heaven can utter it in all its fulness. Is it, then, too high, too deep for creatures such as we are ? Would you have it otherwise ? Would you have a prayer which you can fathom? Nay; such a prayer could never have come from the lips of the Son of God. Its absolute simplicity, its fathomless meaning, its all-embracing charity, are the stamp of its divine origin. This is why it has "shallows which the lamb may ford, and depths which the elephant must swim." To pride and Pharisaism, to selfishness and hatred, it will remain for ever a dead and empty i formula. But it will tremble into angelic music to the ear of humility, and glow and breathe with all its celestial ardour to the heart of gentleness and love. HALLOWED BE THY NAME J) : " Hallowed be Thy name."— St. Matthew vi. 9. MANY, I think, if they spoke with perfect frank- ness, would say that, of all the seven petitions in the Lord's Prayer, this was the one which is least I'eal to them. Is it so with any of you who hear me ? If it is so, should not this be a strong reason for ex- amining more deeply what the petition means ? For observe that our Lord not only made room for it in this brief prayer, but placed it in the very forefront ; and did so though He has just been uttering the strongest possible warning against all vain and artificial petitions. Milton sings of the evening star : Hesperus, that led The starry train, rode brightest. The first star is the most lustrous of all the night. May not this first prayer " Hallowed be Thy name" ^ be the brightest of all ; the most radiant Pleiad of the seven petitions ? y 44 THE LORD'S PRAYER I think that it is ; and oh that God would give us this evening star ! For observe, *' Hallowed be Thy name " is almost the last thing which we should think of putting into our prayers. Least of all should we be inclined to put this prayer before all the rest, because we are essentially and intensely selfish, and this prayer is J absolutely and supremely unselfish. We saw that Christ insisted upon unselfishness when He taught us to say " Our Father " ; in this petition, with yet diviner force, He teaches, not unselfishness only, but self-forgetfulness. If in the Preface " Our Father which art in heaven " He strikes the keynotes of reverence and trustfulness, in the first clause He points to the absorption of the thought of self in the thought of God as the only true orientation of our prayers. It is as though He said to us : You are not to live for yourself ; your chief end is to glorify God here, and enjoy Him for ever in heaven hereafter. How needful is the lesson ! The form which our prayers tend to take is that poor bargaining of the imperfect patriarch : " If Thou wilt give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, then shall the Lord be my God." But ultimately this is as much an earthly prayer as the " Allah, give me a hundred sequins ; just a hundred sequins," of the poor Mahometan. The only yjetition in the Lord's Prayer with which the carnal mind has much affinity is *' Give me my HALLOWED BE THY NAME 45 daily bread ; " and even that it despises as scanty and insufficient. It is ever pestering God witii selfish and unseemly desires, which are of the earth earthy. We are like worthless vagrants, bursting with our coarse mendicancy into the presence of a king. Christ discourages this kind of beggaiy because it soon becomes the degradation of all prayer. It is not of course that we have no need of daily bread : our Heavenly Father knows that we have : Christ Himself encourages us to ask for it in due place and measure ; but He says : " Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." He utterly discoun- tenances the putting of our miserable selves and our own mean desires into the forefront. He would teach us that our shivering egotism and small indivi- duality is not to be the pivot of the universe. The day was when men held the geocentric theory of the solar system, and thought that the heaven with all its starry multitudes revolved round our atom- earth. Christ teaches us that the moral order, like the physical, is not geocentric, but heliocentric ; that it rolls round Himself as the Eisen Sun of righteousness. If we do not follow this method and principle of Christ, our prayers will first degenerate into mere clamour for drossy gains and inch-high advancements, and next we shall become full of hatred of the God 46 THE LORD'S PRAYER who, for our own sakes, may refuse us these paltry and dubious boons ; — just as the Breton peasant flogs the image of his saint who has not granted him a good crop ; or just as our poor passionate King, Henry II., with infinite blasphemy, when he had lost the town of Le Mans, hurled at God his frenzied curse : " Since Thou hast taken from me the town I loved best, where I was born and where my father lies buried, I will have my revenge on Thee too; I will rob Thee of that thing Thou lovest most in me." Ah ! if we would only remember the principle that to become and not to get should be more the motive of our prayers, that the true tone of prayer is the " Hallowed be Thy name " of the adoring child, not the "Give, give" of the daughters of the horse- leech—neither our prayers nor our lives would be so poor. But even if we do not besiege high heaven with mere selfish mendicancy, many would at least think that no petition could, without conventionality, take precedence of " Forgive us our trespasses." It is a right, a most necessary petition ; yet even that petition may only be selfishness under another form : the self- ishness of remorse and terror ; selfishness still — even if it be expanded to infinitude. And this too has its own deplorable results. Nearly all the corruptions of religion — nearly all that has made religion ruthless and revolting; all the dehnmauised squalor of self- HALLOWED BE THY NAME 47 torture, whether of the Indian yogi or the Christian eremite ; all the thrice-accursed infamies of the Con- fessional and the Inquisition; all the horrors of religious madness and blind fanaticism ; all the aber- rations of an apostate theology have come from this exclusive thrusting into prominence of the religion of selfish fear. It should be cast out by the spirit of love, because fear hath torment. There are things which loom larger in the noble mind even than individual salvation ; like Paul's " I could wish my- self accursed from God for my brethren's sake ; " or even Danton's Que mon nom soit flUri, pourvu que la France soit litre. God would have us come to Him first as a Father : He would have us love Hini. All else follows that. We read how the French boy at Ratisbon rode up exultingly to Napoleon's side, and told him that the victory was won. The chief's eye brightened : " But you are wounded, my boy," he said. " Killed, sire ! " said the youth, and dropped down dead. The noble- ness of the story lies in the boy's self-forgetfulness. We read how the swift runner Pheidippides, who bore to Athens the news of Marathon, sank dead on the first threshold with the words on his lips, Xaipere koL xaipoixi^v — " Rejoice ye ! we too rejoice." In these fine instances individuality was lost in patriotism. Patriotism is noble, because it rises above the narrow little selfishnesses of the individual. 48 THE LORD'S PRAYER Wliich of us, at this moment, does not feel some- thing of that spirit, as in these anxious days we pray : Oh God, stretch forth Thy mighty hand, And guide and save our fatherland ! But there can be no true love of our country apart from a love of the supreme goodness. Christ would have us merge all earthly desires in adoration, and be lost in the infinite ocean of God's love. That fiery patriotism of the French camp is in- trinsically nobler than the revolting religionism of the Spanish cloister. Oh, that we felt all this more ; that we were sufficiently noble to feel it more ! The early Christians felt it when even on their dim graves in the Catacombs they sketched the deer, as though they would say : " As the hart i^anteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, God. My soul is athirst for God ; yea, even for the living God ! When shall I come and appear before God?" How much, then, should we thank God that this high petition is so divinely, so splendidly unlike even what, in our selfish ignorance, we might have taken for our better prayers ! It teaches us that we are nothing, that God is all in all ; it teaches us to lie still in the light of God's countenance ; to be content sometimes merely to bask in the sunshine of His love. HALLOWED BE THY NAME 49 It is told of one of the best saints of the Middle AgeSj St. Thomas of Aquino, that when Christ appeared to him in a vision and said, Bene scriji- sisti de me, Thoma ; qiiam mercedem accipies^ the rapt saint answered, lion aliam nisi Te, Domine — No other gift than Thyself, Lord. Ah ! how does the world become nothing to them to whom God is all ! St. Theresa once dreamed she saw an angel who had in one hand a curtain and in the other a shell of water, and he said that he meant to hide heaven and quench hell, that men might learn to love God for Himself alone. Certainly our prayers are worth nothing unless the one which takes the precedence of them all is : '* Teach me to do the thing that pleaseth Thee, for Thou art my God. Let Thy loving Spirit lead me into the land of righteousness." And that prayer is but another form of " Hallowed be Thy_name ; " it is an emptying of self that we may be filledjwith all the fulness of GodT Tea, it is Christ's beatitude : " Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled." So far then, brethren, as to the nature of the petition and the rich lessons which its place in the prayer may teach us. But now we must try to see more nearly what the petition actually means. i. " Hallowed he Tky name." His name is Himself, as He is made known to us. The name of God differentiates Him from all other beings, as men are X J 50 THE LORD'S PRAYER by their names one from another \ and nothing is more essential than that we should understand this name, for it were almost better not to think of God at all than to think of Him wrongly and ignobly. Every cruel superstition which has debased mankind has had its origin in unworthy thoughts of God, and primarily in making man — man as he now is — the measure and model of God, instead of understanding that it is only spiritual man, man as he should be, who is made in His image, after His likeness. No chapter in the history of mankind is more deplorable than that which shows how utterly they have failed to feel after Him and find Him. There is hardly an age, hardly a nation, in which men have not dishallowed God's name up setting up for them- selves the grossest travesties of God. Deifying their own hearts' lusts, they have imagined gods polluted and lascivious as themselves, whose worship was infamy. Deifying their own hatred and fear, they have made God a monster of ruthlessness and blood. Deifying their own unbelief, they have spoken of God as did the sceptics of the Old Testament, " Tush ! thou God carest not for it • " or imagined Him like the gods of Epicurus, who " sate beside their nectar, careless of mankind." Deifying their own formalism, priests and Pharisees have imagined a God as petty as themselves, troubling Himself with the threads and tassels and the colours of phylac- HALLOWED BE THY NAME 51 teries, till, in their devotion to these imbecilities, they could neglect righteousness and justice, and crucify the Son whom He sent. They have been polytheists, worshipping many gods ; or atheists., denying any god ; or ditheists, believing in a good and an evil god ; or pantheists, believing that everything is God. And every one of these deadly errors has had its analogue during long y centuries of erring Christianity. There was little to choose between the Moloch of the Valley of Hinnom and the Moloch of black-robed monks and sacerdotal Inquisitors at the loathly auto-cla-f4 of Seville, or the accursed stakes of Smithfield and Oxford. In- sane religions have set God forth as an insatiable avenger, and even Art has degraded the meek and loving Saviour of the world into a tumultuous and wrathful Hercules, hurling millions into endless flames. More than one sweet saint of God has been driven to say to his raging opponents, " Your god is my devil." There is little, again, to choose between the care- less gods of Epicurus and the easy indifferentist who has dwindled into a mere phantom of good nature, until the sensuous and unbelieving Frenchman begins to talk of " le bon Dieu " in an accent of indulgent patronage. Such insolences, such aberrations, show us how true it is of almost all men — " Thou thoughtest wickedly that I was even such an one as thyself." J 52 THE LORD'S PRAYER How infinitely necessary, then, is this prayer in tii