Class _ 
 Book 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 
 
OF 
 
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 BY 
 WILLIAM R. RICHARDS 
 
 PASTOK OF THE BRICK PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 
 NEW YORK CITY 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 TTbe TKHestmfnster press 
 
 MCMIX 
 

 Copyright, 1909, by the Trustees of 
 
 The Presbyterian Board of Publication and 
 
 Sabbath-School Work 
 
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FOREWORD 
 
 The aim of the following study is to call at- 
 tention to certain features of our Lord's teach- 
 ing as exhibited in the prayer which bears his 
 name. On such a theme one may hardly hope 
 to say anything that has not often been said 
 before, but some things are worth saying over 
 and over. 
 
 Especially tie prayer always reminds us that 
 the human bro herhood into which Jesus urged 
 his disciples rests on a faith in the divine father- 
 hood ; and that if we want a righteous democracy 
 among men we must pray for the kingdom of 
 
 God. 
 
 W. R. R. 
 
 The Brick Church, New York. 
 September, 1909. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction. Teach Us to Prat 9 
 
 I. Our Father 21 
 
 II. Hallowed Be Thy Name .. 37 
 
 III. Thy Kingdom Comb 54 
 
 IV. Our Daily Bread 75 
 
 V. Forgive Us Our Debts 94 
 
 VI. Temptation «♦ 113 
 
 Conclusion. In His Name 131 
 
W&t JLqxV* draper 
 
 yi^ur Jf atfjer tobicb art in beaben, 
 \I7 ^allotoeb be tb? name. ®bP 
 femgbom come. ZCfJP totU be bone 
 in eartf), ad tt te m beaben. <©ibe 
 u* tbte bap our bail? breab. &nb 
 forgibe u* our bebt*, a* toe forgtbe 
 our bebtor*. &nb ieab us; not tnto 
 temptation, but beltber u* from ebtl: 
 Jf or tfnne te tfje femgbom, anb tbe 
 potoer, anb tbe glorp, for eber. 
 amen. 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 Ueacb Zfts to flSrag 
 
 "Lord, teach us to pray," said one of the 
 disciples ; but was not the Lord always do- 
 ing this for them 1 What was his own living 
 example but one long, uninterrupted course 
 of instruction in the duty and privilege of 
 prayer to God? 
 
 Those who came nearest to Jesus evi- 
 dently felt that he was one who lived con- 
 sciously and constantly in a divine presence. 
 John the Baptist down by the Jordan bank 
 seemed to see the divine Spirit, in bodily 
 form like a dove, descending and abiding 
 upon him. Martha said, ■ ' I know that what- 
 soever thou wilt ask of God, God will give 
 it thee," intimating the same sense of con- 
 tinual communion. Jesus himself used to 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 speak to his disciples about his Father as 
 one without whom not even a sparrow could 
 fall to the ground; one, therefore, who 
 could be trusted to take good care of them ; 
 one who knew all their needs and could be 
 trusted at all times and everywhere to keep 
 them safe. To use a phrase that has grown 
 dear to some of us in these later times, Jesus 
 was one who had made a " practice of the 
 presence of God. ' ' And the disciples knew 
 this, felt it. What the old patriarch had 
 once seen in his dream at night they seemed 
 to behold in the waking hours of every day : 
 "the heaven open, and the angels of God 
 ascending and descending upon the Son 
 of man. ' ' But what was all this but teach- 
 ing them the very deepest part of the les- 
 son of prayer? For if you have learned 
 to feel God, and to trust him as one always 
 near you, always looking upon you, always 
 listening to you, always caring for you, the 
 rest of the lesson could not be very diffi- 
 cult. It is the most natural thing in the 
 10 
 
TEACH US TO PRAY 
 
 world to speak to your friend — when you 
 have anything to say to him — if only you 
 know that you have a friend and that he 
 is here. 
 
 But though Christ's whole life was thus 
 a life of constant prayerfulness or com- 
 munion, he also offered his disciples the 
 example of setting apart particular times 
 for praying. And I think there is no other 
 part of our Lord's example that most of 
 us need to be more careful in copying than 
 this. For it has come to be the fashion 
 with some 'excellent people not to think 
 much of special times for prayer, but to 
 insist more upon the duty of active serv- 
 ice for men. To make sure of getting your 
 day's work done; to spend your days go- 
 ing about doing good ; to use your time to 
 feed the hungry and clothe the naked and 
 heal the sick — that will be to spend your 
 life as Jesus Christ did, so men say — that 
 will be far better than burying yourself 
 uselessly in some quiet convent for undis- 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 turbed prayer to God. "To labor is to 
 pray," they say; "he prayeth best who 
 loveth best." And all that is very true, 
 and a most important Christian truth in its 
 proper place. But if we are really trying 
 to learn these truths from the example of 
 Jesus, then we must not forget to ask also 
 where it was that he himself sought and 
 found the strength that should make pos- 
 sible all those days of extraordinary activ- 
 ity and usefulness. And it is not difficult 
 to learn where he found it if one really 
 wishes to know. 
 
 In one place in the record you will read 
 how he healed a demoniac child whom his 
 disciples had been laboring over in vain. 
 And when they asked him afterwards why 
 their own efforts had been so fruitless, 
 when his were so successful, he answered, 
 "This kind goeth not out but by prayer." 
 And if you read back you will learn that 
 he himself had, in fact, just come down 
 from the Mountain of Transfiguration, and 
 12 
 
TEACH US TO PRAY 
 
 that he had gone up into that mount to 
 pray. Now if any of us are trying to imi- 
 tate Christ's life of active usefulness on 
 the plain without following also the other 
 part of his example when he went up into 
 the mount to pray, it is likely that many 
 of our efforts will be as fruitless as were 
 those of these puzzled disciples. 
 
 And this was not an isolated or peculiar 
 incident. The narrative makes it clear that 
 Jesus very often went away thus alone by 
 himself, or with only two or three com- 
 panions, to pray. It is true he was in some 
 sense praying all the while and every- 
 where; that is, in the sense that he lived 
 constantly in the assurance of his Father's 
 presence with him. But that was not 
 enough for Christ. He must have times 
 when he could pray and give his whole 
 mind to it. It seems to have been his cus- 
 tom before any great emergency to seek out 
 such opportunity for undisturbed prayer 
 to his Father. 
 
 13 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 Before he picked out the twelve men who 
 were to be called apostles and to work 
 with him and after him in founding his 
 church, we read that "he went out into a 
 mountain to pray, and continued all night 
 in prayer to God. " * ' When it was day, ' ' it 
 says, he came down among the people and 
 resumed his active work among them. 
 
 And so afterwards, when the last great 
 emergency of his life was close at hand 
 and when he was about to be given into the 
 power of his enemies, he sought the shaded 
 solitude of the Garden of Gethsemane that 
 he might pray. That one last night of his 
 life may be taken as a very important part 
 of the instruction that Jesus offered his 
 disciples on this subject. "Lord, teach us 
 to pray," was their request, and here in 
 the garden he was teaching them. 
 
 How many different bits of teaching he 
 gave them on this subject during the hours 
 of that one night. First, when he took the 
 bread and the cup and blessed them — for 
 
 14 
 
TEACH US TO PRAY 
 
 evidently this had been his custom when- 
 ever he and others were eating together. 
 Whether he was feeding the five thousand 
 on the hillside in Galilee, or his twelve 
 friends in the upper chamber in Jerusalem, 
 or just two of them in the stopping place at 
 Emmaus, his custom was, as he took the 
 bread, to speak his thanks to God before 
 he ate it. This gesture of courtesy toward 
 the divine Benefactor was so habitual with 
 him that it was the first thing those two dis- 
 ciples at Emmaus knew him by after he was 
 risen from the grave. The Master "was 
 known of them in breaking of bread." 
 When we ask that "the grace of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ" may be with us all, it is well 
 to remember that one characteristic exhibi- 
 tion of this gracious quality in him was the 
 habit of saying grace before meat. 
 
 Then, for a second word of instruction, 
 Christ warned his overconfident disciple 
 Peter that a sifting of temptation was 
 about to fall upon them all: "But I have 
 
 15 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 prayed for thee," he said to Peter, "that 
 thy faith fail not." Those who wish the 
 Lord to teach them to pray as he prayed 
 must study that part of his example when 
 he prayed for his friends. By all means 
 manifest your friendliness by friendly 
 deeds, feeding your friends when hungry, 
 clothing and sheltering them when they are 
 cold, and healing them when they are sick, 
 for Christ's example encourages us to such 
 helpful activities; but you are not follow- 
 ing his example through unless you also 
 pray for your friends. 
 
 Then follows that prayer related in the 
 seventeenth chapter of John, when these 
 eleven friends of Jesus heard him praying 
 for them all, and for all who should believe 
 through their word. 
 
 And then last of all comes the prayer 
 in the Garden, when the storm broke over 
 our Lord's own soul, and the bewildered 
 disciples heard their Master praying for 
 himself: "0 my Father, if it be possible, 
 
 16 
 
TEACH US TO PRAY 
 
 let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, 
 not as I will, but as thou wilt. ' ' And then 
 again the second time they heard him say, 
 "0 my Father, if this cup may not pass 
 away from me, except I drink it, thy will 
 be done." 
 
 On this night some of the disciples were 
 near enough to overhear how he prayed for 
 himself. We have no report of what he 
 had said on other of those long nights of 
 watching when he had been alone with God. 
 We do not know how often on earlier occa- 
 sions he may have felt something of the 
 bitterness of the cup appointed him to 
 drink, offering up his prayer and suppli- 
 cation with strong crying and tears. Only 
 once, on this last night of the long life 
 struggle, there were witnesses near enough 
 to overhear, and to tell us afterwards how 
 Jesus used to pray for himself. 
 
 So that one night, the last night of our 
 Lord's earthly life, gives us from his ex- 
 ample this fourfold instruction on the sub- 
 17 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 ject of prayer : first, when he thanked God 
 for his good gift of bread; then, when he 
 prayed for his friend Peter ; then, when he 
 prayed for all his friends and for others; 
 then, when he prayed for himself. When 
 any disciple says, "Lord, teach us to 
 pray," he must be ready to take his teach- 
 ing — the best kind of teaching — from the 
 example of the Master when he prayed. 
 No other part of our Lord's example de- 
 mands a more careful study from his dis- 
 ciples. It is not reasonable to suppose that 
 any disciple can follow Christ successfully 
 in the kind of active work that he was al- 
 ways doing for men who has not also 
 learned from him something of the secret 
 of his strength for doing that work. 
 
 What does any great city most need from 
 the churches in it in order that the people 
 may be helped as they would be helped if 
 Jesus in bodily form were walking about 
 the streets! Some may answer that the 
 chief need is of a more generous supply of 
 
 18 
 
TEACH US TO PRAY 
 
 coats and hats and shoes, or more spacious 
 orphanages and hospitals. But whenever 
 the need of such purchasable commodities 
 is made sufficiently evident, you hardly 
 know what to do with the abundance of the 
 contributions offered. 
 
 What is needed most, and this need is 
 not so quickly supplied, is that, of those 
 called Christians, there should be more 
 who have learned from the Master to make 
 a practice of the presence of God; so that 
 whenever we speak of him it shall be in the 
 tone of men who know; and when a hard 
 bit of work has to be done we can do it with 
 the kind of strength that came to the Master 
 from prayer ; and when some dark trouble 
 or fierce temptation falls, staggering men's 
 faith, we can meet it as he met his after 
 he had watched and prayed in Gethsemane. 
 
 That appalling disaster of a few months 
 ago in southern Italy, which plunged a na- 
 tion into mourning and stirred the sym- 
 pathy of the world, made large claim for 
 
 19 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 material help, and the help was promptly 
 offered; but was there not, and is there 
 not, still greater need throughout that 
 stricken and desolate region of men and 
 women who could face even such dreadful 
 trouble and still cling to their trust in a 
 God who loves ? Where can you learn such 
 faith except from him who could look for- 
 ward upon the black mystery of the cross 
 itself, while his soul was in agony and his 
 sweat as it were great drops of blood fall- 
 ing to the ground, and still say, "Father, 
 if this cup may not pass away from me, 
 except I drink it, thy will be done." 
 
 Yes, the greatest blessing that the 
 churches could confer would be a supply 
 of disciples who had learned from their 
 Master's example how to pray. 
 
 The following chapters attempt a brief 
 study of the sentences of the Lord's Prayer, 
 but the best introduction to any such study 
 is to recall first the personal example of 
 the Lord himself and how he prayed. 
 
 20 
 
CHAPTER I 
 ©ur jFatbet 
 
 We have seen in the introductory chapter 
 that our Lord by his own example was al- 
 ways teaching his disciples to pray; but 
 when a specific request for such instruction 
 came from one of the disciples, what the 
 man himself intended to ask for was some 
 form of words that might properly be used 
 in their supplications. Such a form was 
 furnished them, and from that day to this 
 the disciples have loved to use it in their 
 prayers to God. And we never tire of 
 studying it as a model for all our praying, 
 even when we might not word our requests 
 according to this particular form. 
 
 The successive chapters of this little book 
 are studies of the successive petitions of 
 this form of prayer which Christ taught to 
 his disciples. 
 
 21 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 "But when ye pray," he said, and as 
 good old Matthew Henry says, "it is taken 
 for granted that all the disciples of Christ 
 pray. As soon as ever Paul was converted, 
 * behold, he prayeth.' You may as soon find 
 a living man that doth not breathe as a 
 Christian that doth not pray." "When ye 
 pray, . . . after this manner therefore pray 
 ye." 
 
 "Our Father," and that one opening 
 phrase of the prayer will furnish material 
 enough for this first chapter. 
 
 May I quote here another quaint obser- 
 vation from old Matthew Henry: "The 
 Lord's Prayer (as indeed every prayer) 
 is a letter sent from earth to heaven. Here 
 is the inscription of the letter, the person 
 to whom it is directed, 'Our Father'; the 
 place, where, 'in heaven'; the contents of 
 it, in several errands of request ; the close, 
 'for thine is the kingdom'; the seal, 
 'Amen'; and if you will, the date, too, 'this 
 day.' " 
 
 22 
 
OUR FATHER 
 
 This chapter will be taken up with the 
 inscription — the person to whom this let- 
 ter is addressed, "Our Father." 
 
 The question has been much discussed by 
 students of the Bible how far the several 
 phrases of this prayer were original with 
 Christ; or whether he may have selected 
 them from phrases already familiar to the 
 Jews in their customs of worship. Some 
 of them must have been familiar, for some 
 evident parallels have been pointed out; 
 but Canon Plumptre seems justified in say- 
 ing that "these parallels do not carry us 
 very far." At all events, however it be 
 with the separate phrases, this Lord's 
 Prayer as a whole was altogether original 
 with Christ in the new spirit which breathes 
 through and unifies all its sentences. Pre- 
 eminently is that true of this opening 
 phrase, this name for the God to whom the 
 prayer is to be offered. 
 
 The ancient Hebrews, like our own In- 
 dians and other primitive peoples, made 
 
 23 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 much of names. The names they claimed 
 for themselves or gave to their children 
 were always understood to mean something, 
 something indicative of the character or 
 circumstances of the person named. And 
 so it must be with the name for God — it was 
 far more than a sound; it was the dis- 
 closure of God himself. To the mind of a 
 devout Hebrew there could be no more 
 vitally interesting religious question than, 
 What is God's real name? 
 
 We read of Jacob in that crowning spir- 
 itual experience that we call his wrestling, 
 that he said to the mysterious Antagonist, 
 "Tell me thy name." The name was not 
 told then. But we read afterwards of 
 Moses, in the hour of his great experience 
 by the burning bush, that he asked a similar 
 question of the Presence that had been or- 
 dering him to Egypt ; by what name should 
 Moses speak of God to the people in Egypt ; 
 and the name was told, "I am." "I am 
 hath sent thee." The early patriarchs had 
 
 24 
 
OUR FATHER 
 
 known God only as the Almighty ; now it is 
 the "I am," Jehovah. First came the 
 thought of God as power; now the deeper 
 thought of God as being. 
 
 But Christ does not put either of those 
 names at the head of his prayer; it is 
 ' ' Father, ' ' and our question is how far this 
 title is original with Christ, how gener- 
 ally this word "Father" had come into 
 Jewish usage as a true name for God in 
 prayer. 
 
 Of course, you can find some hints at 
 such a usage — not very many — in the books 
 of our Old Testament. As where, in Deu- 
 teronomy * or Isaiah 2 or Malachi, 3 the peo- 
 ple are rebuked as disobedient and disre- 
 spectful children. Malachi says, speaking 
 for God, "If then I be a father, where is 
 my honor?" Or again God is sometimes 
 appealed to as the last resource of those 
 who have no other, as in Isaiah 4 one is 
 heard crying, "Doubtless thou art our 
 
 1 Ch. 32 : 6. 2 Ch. 1:2. 3 Ch. 1 : 6. « Ch. 63 : 16. 
 25 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 father, though Abraham be ignorant of 
 us, and Israel acknowledge us not." Or 
 again the psalmist cries, 5 "When my 
 father and my mother forsake me, then 
 the Lord will take me up." But the 
 passages are not many. No such name 
 would stand in their common forms of 
 prayer. 
 
 In those later Hebrew writings which we 
 call the Apocrypha, these hints at a faith in 
 the fatherhood of God become somewhat 
 more common ; as where the son of Sirach 8 
 calls God the Father and Governor of all 
 his whole life, or where Tobit declares 
 that "God is our Father for ever." It 
 is evident that the sound of this name at 
 least would not be altogether unfamiliar 
 to our Lord's Jewish hearers. And, in- 
 deed, heathen as well as Jews had some- 
 times spoken of the divine being as a sort 
 of parent to the creation : "Zeus the father 
 of gods and men." But that this name 
 
 6 Ps. 27 : 10. e Ch. 23 : 1. 
 26 
 
OUR FATHER 
 
 should be used as Jesus was now encourag- 
 ing them to use it, used by every disciple 
 at the beginning of every prayer — this was 
 a religious phenomenon without precedent. 
 That any one plain man in his own daily 
 personal prayer should venture to say, 
 "Father," as if that were name enough; 
 as if that told all that we ever need to tell 
 about the God whom we wish our prayer to 
 reach; — there never was a more original 
 contribution to human thought than when 
 Jesus spoke this opening phrase in the 
 prayer which he was teaching for all his 
 disciples, and so for the whole world. 
 
 But here let me recur for a moment to 
 what was said in the introductory chapter, 
 that our Lord did more than furnish a form 
 of words for prayer, that his own example 
 had been for these men one long course of 
 instruction in the subject of prayer. In- 
 deed if it had not been so, if this new name 
 for God had been a form of words and 
 nothing else, it is quite certain that the 
 
 27 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 world would never have learned it so as to 
 remember and use it. But it was very 
 much more than a form; it came from a 
 speaker who himself always began his 
 prayers in this way. It was by his own ex- 
 ample that Jesus was teaching men, and 
 has taught men whenever they pray to say, 
 "Father/' 
 
 There are two peculiarities to be noticed 
 in the religious situation of our time; the 
 one is that to many it seems increasingly 
 difficult to believe that the unseen power 
 which made and rules the world can be like 
 a father ; but the other peculiar fact of the 
 times is that if we are to go on praying at 
 all we must now believe in the fatherhood 
 of him to whom we pray. 
 
 That first difficulty of believing that God 
 is like a father arises from our wider ob- 
 servation of the stern facts of the universe. 
 The apparent heartlessness of it weighs 
 upon our souls like an intolerable burden. 
 The very phrases that our later teachers 
 
 28 
 
OUR FATHER 
 
 have taught us: " natural selection," "the 
 struggle for existence, " " the survival of the 
 fittest" — what a hopeless, Godless sound 
 they have ! Or again, when the earthquake 
 swallowed up those Italian cities, how many 
 were asking what father, if he had the 
 power to prevent it, would have allowed 
 such an immense disaster to fall on his chil- 
 dren. Men never knew before, as we know 
 now, how hard it must be in our moods of 
 scientific observation to turn our faces 
 toward the mysterious but inexorable 
 power that rules the world and say, 
 "Father." 
 
 Yet that is what nearly the whole world 
 is saying in its moods of prayer, so far as 
 it is moved to pray at all. For in these 
 days we have all come to believe that a 
 being of infinite power merely, or of in- 
 finite wisdom, but without the moral quali- 
 ties that would allow us to trust him as a 
 father, ought not to be called God, and 
 would not be worthy of our prayer. Men 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 of other ages might worship their bloody 
 Moloch, or Baal, or Mars, or Thor — we 
 simply could not. So while it is harder 
 now than ever before to believe in a 
 Heavenly Father, and pray to him, yet we 
 must offer our prayer to him, else we shall 
 not pray. That is the twofold peculiarity 
 of the present religious situation the whole 
 world over. And we do pray to him. 
 Every day more and more of the children 
 of men are lifting up their voices in prayer 
 to "our Father which art in heaven." 
 
 The historical explanation of this 
 strange religious phenomenon of our time 
 is that Jesus, by the compelling power of 
 his own example, has been teaching the 
 world to say, "Father." For he himself 
 said it ; spite of all the dark mysteries of the 
 world, he said it, and he knew it. A volume 
 of sermons has lately been published under 
 the title ' ' The Creed of Jesus, ' ' meaning by 
 that title "The Lord's Prayer," and the 
 title applies with peculiar appropriateness 
 
 30 
 
OUR FATHER 
 
 to the first phrase of the prayer, ' ' Father ' ' ; 
 there you have the creed of Jesus himself. 
 Through the whole story of his life, from 
 those early days of his childhood in the 
 temple when he was about his " Father's 
 business, ' ' through the scene of his baptism 
 and his temptation, through the whole 
 course of his teaching, in his own prayer 
 in Gethsemane, and his prayer as he hung 
 dying on the cross, always it was ' ' Father. ' ' 
 The one event which has made the deep- 
 est mark upon the history of the world is 
 the birth into the world of this one child 
 of our race whose one surest element of 
 faith and knowledge was that the unseen 
 God was his Father. That was truly the 
 creed of Jesus Christ; that is why now 
 nearly the whole world, if it is ever moved 
 to pray at all, finds its lips shaping them- 
 selves to say, " Father." Already in all 
 parts of the earth you could find a fulfillment 
 of what Paul wrote long ago in his letter to 
 the Galatians: "Because ye are sons, God 
 
 31 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into 
 your hearts, crying, Abba, Father." Oh, 
 may the Lord teach us all this lesson. For 
 really I do not believe we can ever master it 
 except as we learn it from him. It must be 
 the spirit of God's dear Son coming into 
 our hearts that should ever enable us to 
 speak so daring a name, and mean it. 
 Some one has well said that "this is a 
 prayer that might be committed to memory 
 in a few minutes; but it is the work of a 
 lifetime to learn it by heart;" and what 
 we want is to learn it by heart, so that we 
 can mean it when we say, ' ' Father. ' ' 
 
 ' ' Father, ' ' yes, but in the prayer it is " Our 
 Father, ' ' for there are other children ; and 
 we are not to forget these others when we 
 pray. Let me quote you a few sentences 
 from a sermon preached more than fifteen 
 hundred years ago in the old city of Con- 
 stantinople: "Jesus teaches, moreover, to 
 make our prayer common, in behalf of our 
 brethren also. For he saith not 'My 
 
 32 
 
OUR FATHER 
 
 Father,' but 'Our Father,' offering up 
 his supplications for the body in common, 
 nowhere looking to his own, but everywhere 
 to his neighbor's good; and by this he at 
 once takes away hatred, and quells pride, 
 and casts out envy, and brings in the mother 
 of all good things, even charity, and exter- 
 minates the inequality of human affairs; 
 and shows how far the equality reaches be- 
 tween the king and the poor man. . . . For 
 to all hath he given one nobility, having 
 vouchsafed to be called the Father of all 
 alike." The slow passing centuries have 
 taken nothing from the truth of those 
 words spoken so long ago by St. Chrysos- 
 tom. Jesus was laying the foundation, not 
 of Christian charity alone, but of a uni- 
 versal democracy, with the whole doctrine 
 of freedom and equal human rights, when 
 he taught us in praying to say, "Our 
 Father." For if God is our Father, it 
 means that we have brothers whom we 
 remember in our prayer. 
 
 33 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 The attempt has been made sometimes 
 to establish a doctrine of human brother- 
 hood, while forgetting or denying the divine 
 fatherhood. But the success of such at- 
 tempts has not been encouraging. Take, 
 for instance, that great revolution of 1789 
 in France. There was a land where the 
 Christian religion had long been discredited 
 by the corruption and greed and heartless- 
 ness of its official representatives; and so, 
 when the outburst came, men were impa- 
 tient to have done with everything belong- 
 ing to the hated church. Brothers, they 
 would be to one another; but no Father, 
 God; let their worship be rendered to a 
 goddess of reason, or to an opera dancer, 
 or to Robespierre's "Supreme Being"; to 
 anything rather than the Father of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ. Almost everywhere in 
 Paris you can see deeply chiseled in the 
 stone the old revolutionary motto of " Lib- 
 erty, equality, fraternity"; but those same 
 men were preparing for 1793 and the Reign 
 
 34 
 
OUR FATHER 
 
 of Terror; and again for 1870 and the 
 Commune. Historically that term brother- 
 hood has now an ominous sound, unless 
 there be a Father. And so any of us who 
 really wish to deal fairly with our human 
 brothers; who really wish to see that 
 motto of liberty, equality, fraternity, 
 worked out into a social order that shall 
 be altogether brotherly, must pratice our 
 lips and hearts over this prayer which 
 Christ has taught us to our Father. For it 
 was Jesus, always knowing himself the Son 
 of God, who has given us also the one, the 
 only, effective example of universal human 
 brotherliness. 
 
 I was talking once some years ago to a 
 poor girl who had not many days to live 
 and not much breath for speech, and 
 whispering to me about her own weakness 
 and weariness of body and of mind, she 
 said that even when she tried to pray she 
 could not get beyond, ' ' Our Father. ' ' The 
 saying has often come to me since. If she 
 
 35 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 had gone as far as that certainly it was a 
 good prayer. And I think the Father 
 could be trusted to fill in for his tired child 
 all that was needed of confession, and 
 thanksgiving, and request. Our Father, 
 
CHAPTER II 
 Iballowefc 3Be TTbp fllame 
 
 The first petition of the Lord's Prayer. 
 It is to be noticed at the outset that this 
 model prayer begins with requests that have 
 to do with God. In this it resembles the 
 commandments of the ancient Jewish law. 
 For the first table of that law lays down 
 the duties which a man owes to God; 
 only in the second table do we come to 
 the duties that he owes to his fellow-men. 
 When our Lord issued his famous sum- 
 mary or interpretation of the ancient 
 law he followed the same order, for the 
 first and great commandment was of 
 love to God; and the second, which was 
 like unto it, was of love to our neighbor 
 man. 
 
 So it is now in the matter of praying. 
 The first three petitions have to do with 
 
 37 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER \ 
 
 God and his glory and his kingdom, and 
 after that we come to the petitions which 
 express our desire for our own good as 
 men. 
 
 There are some good people in the world 
 who profess great admiration for Jesus 
 and his teaching and his example, but who 
 quite contradict his teaching and example 
 in this important particular, for what he 
 placed first of all they entirely omit. They 
 profess themselves eager to follow him in 
 his kindness toward men, but they decline 
 to listen when he speaks of reverence 
 toward God. That blunder is to be avoided. 
 If Jesus is worthy of any attention from 
 men it is worth while that we should begin 
 with him where he begins. And with him 
 the beginning of all good things, whether in 
 heaven or on earth, was what he called the 
 glory of God, or the hallowing of God's 
 name. The third commandment of the old 
 law was that a man should not take God's 
 name in vain ; now the first petition of the 
 
 3S 
 
HALLOWED BE THY NAME 
 
 new prayer is that God's name may be hal- 
 lowed. 
 
 There is a wonderful passage in one of 
 F. W. Robertson's sermons in which he 
 argues that "the decay in the meaning of 
 words" is a certain mark of "the decay of 
 national religious feeling"; that "the de- 
 basement of a language is a sure mark of 
 the debasement of a nation. ' ' And he adds 
 that the name of God may share this fate. 
 "No marvel that we are taught to pray, 
 'Hallowed be thy name.' We cannot pray 
 a deeper prayer for our country than to 
 say, 'Never may that name in English 
 stand for a lower idea than it stands for 
 now.' " In offering this prayer we ask 
 that we and our fellow-men may be enabled 
 to keep the third commandment, that we 
 may never take God's name in vain, that we 
 may be saved from all flippant irreverence 
 of speech. 
 
 One would think that by this time this 
 particular prayer might have been an- 
 
 39 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 swered, this particular command might 
 have been obeyed. For this sin of pro- 
 fanity is so needless and objectless, so re- 
 pulsive to all refined taste, so degrading 
 and coarsening to the sinner. Nothing in 
 the world to be gained by it, everything in 
 the world to be lost by it. But the 
 prayer is not yet fully answered, that com- 
 mandment is not yet fully obeyed; the 
 same old sin goes on, and heaven is still in- 
 sulted by this harsh and monotonous chorus 
 of profanity rising from every corner of 
 the earth where men have taken God's 
 name in vain. It still sounds like a con- 
 fession of the sin of our people, perhaps 
 our own, as often as we pray, "Hallowed 
 be thy name." 
 
 But you notice the petition in the prayer 
 takes a positive form, while the language 
 of the older commandment was negative. 
 "Thou shalt not," said the law, and a man 
 might have flattered himself that he was 
 secure against breaking the commandment 
 
 40 
 
HALLOWED BE THY NAME 
 
 if only he was careful enough never to 
 speak the name of God at all. And per- 
 haps that is as far as some of us have ad- 
 vanced in our practice of reverence in our 
 common conversation; for fear of swear- 
 ing we have left the name of God severely 
 alone. 
 
 But evidently, even if that was obeying 
 the commandment, it would be no true an- 
 swer to the request in the Lord's Prayer. 
 "Hallowing God's name" cannot mean the 
 same thing as burying it in oblivion. For 
 remember what this latest and dearest name 
 of God is, as Christ has just been teaching 
 it to us, "Father," "our Father." How 
 would any other father feel toward the use 
 of his own name in the language of his 
 children? He would be grieved, certainly, 
 if he ever heard them speaking it in tones 
 of disrespect. And yet if this offense had 
 been committed because the child was 
 angry or thoughtless, blurting out his 
 words under some strong provocation, or 
 
 41 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 letting them slip without perceiving how 
 much they meant, in such- a case any sen- 
 sible father would make allowance and 
 easily forgive or ignore the childish fault. 
 But how must a father feel if his children 
 never spoke to him at all, never spoke of 
 him at all, never once named his name in 
 their familiar speech ? 
 
 We may well tremble to think how God's 
 ear is still wounded by this harsh chorus of 
 profanity rising from the lips of his ene- 
 mies in every corner of the earth ; but are 
 you sure that the Father's ear may not be 
 still more cruelly wounded by this strange 
 conspiracy of awkward silence which so 
 often falls upon his own children when we 
 ought to be speaking our Father's name? 
 
 If we are careful not to grieve the Lord 
 by any profanity of speech, we must be 
 equally careful not to grieve him by our 
 irreverent and ungrateful silence. "Men 
 conscious of deep and real reverence,'* 
 Robertson says, "are not fearful of the 
 
HALLOWED BE THY NAME 
 
 appearance of irreverence"; and he goes 
 on to show how in the days of the great 
 Hebrew prophets the name of Jehovah 
 used to be named devoutly and freely; a 
 mighty cedar would be called a cedar to 
 Jehovah; a lofty mountain a mountain of 
 Jehovah; Moses was said to be beautiful 
 to God. "No beauty — no greatness — no 
 goodness, was conceivable except as ema- 
 nating from him." It was in a later and 
 more degenerate time, when the spirit of 
 prophecy was dead, that the Jews came to 
 think the name too holy for human lips; 
 and even when reading the Scripture in the 
 synagogue, if they saw those awful char- 
 acters, always substituted another sound. 
 They dared not say Jehovah, but offered 
 the spurious reverence of an awkward si- 
 lence. It would be well if all who have 
 learned from Jesus to call God "our 
 Father" could also learn to hallow his 
 name by using it more naturally and thank- 
 fully in our daily speech at home and 
 
 43 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 among our friends. "Whatsoever ye do," 
 says the apostle, "in word or deed, do all 
 in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving 
 thanks to God and the Father by him." 
 
 So much for reverence when we are at 
 home. But what of the reverence that we 
 try to pay to the name of God when we 
 gather to worship him in church? This 
 first petition in the Lord's Prayer may 
 fairly be taken as the divine warrant of 
 the whole institution of public worship. 
 The first desire of all true believers alike 
 being that God 's name may be hallowed or 
 honored, we all naturally make it our first 
 business on the first day of the week to 
 come together and unite in showing it 
 honor. "God is a Spirit: and they that 
 worship him must worship him in spirit 
 and in truth," and the Father is seeking 
 such to worship him. It is the will of God 
 that we offer worship. This first petition of 
 the Lord's Prayer is to be associated with 
 all the public services of prayer and of 
 
 44 
 
HALLOWED BE THY NAME 
 
 praise. "Hallowed be thy name" — the 
 meaning of every hymn that his people 
 sing, and of every prayer that they offer; 
 of every bended knee or bowed head; of 
 that hush of silence that falls upon those 
 who enter the door of a church — it is all 
 an expression of our common desire that 
 the name of God may be hallowed by us 
 and about us. In everything that we do in 
 our forms of public worship we are en- 
 deavoring ourselves to serve as instruments 
 for bringing about an answer to our request 
 that God's name be hallowed. 
 
 It is to be noted that this petition stands 
 first of all the petitions in the Lord's 
 Prayer. It is the very first thing that a 
 disciple thinks of as he begins to pray ; in- 
 dicating what must be our first business 
 on the first day of every week — to hallow 
 God's name. Nothing else is to take pre- 
 cedence of that. Other things may follow. 
 Before the day is over it will be right to 
 offer a prayer for daily bread, but that can 
 
 45 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 wait till later. Even the prayer for for- 
 giveness of our sins comes later, and the 
 prayer for deliverance from temptation 
 comes later. In Christ's order earliest of 
 all stands this petition that the name of 
 God our Father may be hallowed. 
 
 It reminds one of the oft-repeated decla- 
 ration of the psalmist that he will make his 
 worship of God the very earliest business 
 of the day. "Awake, psaltery and harp," 
 he cries ; ' ' 1 myself will awake early. I will 
 praise thee, Lord, among the people. " " 
 God, thou art my God; early will I seek 
 thee." "Early," what a favorite word it 
 is with him ! Naturally so for a man who 
 could go on to say, as the psalmist says, 
 "My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh 
 longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, 
 where no water is; to see thy power 
 and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in 
 the sanctuary." A man who felt so 
 strongly on the subject would not be 
 apt to be late. "Early will I seek thee." 
 
 46 
 
HALLOWED BE THY NAME 
 
 In another place the psalmist cries to 
 God, "0 satisfy us early with thy mercy; 
 that we may rejoice and be glad all our 
 days. ' ' 
 
 So in the Proverbs we hear Wisdom say- 
 ing, "Those that seek me early shall find 
 me. ' ' So the prophet cries to God, 7 ' ' With 
 my soul have I desired thee in the night; 
 yea, with my spirit within me will I seek 
 thee early. ' ' And so in the Gospel story on 
 that memorable first day of the week cer- 
 tain women were early at the sepulcher, 
 and it was they who were able to come back 
 telling of the vision of the angels, and that 
 the Lord was alive. All these devout and 
 highly favored souls seem to have accepted 
 the logic of the Lord's Prayer which puts 
 this request for the hallowing of God's 
 name earliest among all the petitions; not 
 late, but early. 
 
 So anyone who had learned the Lord's 
 Prayer by heart would find that this 
 
 7 Isa. 26 : 9. 
 
 47 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 "early" is a proper word to be associated 
 with all the exercises of the public worship 
 of God; not late, but early. Those who 
 have made an appointment with him, or 
 with each other, that at some specified time 
 we will unite in showing honor to his name, 
 if we are really anxious that his name 
 should be honored, will expect to be at the 
 rendezvous on time. Of course our best 
 endeavors at promptness do not always 
 succeed. The common agencies of trans- 
 portation cannot always be depended upon 
 to live up to their schedule. Sickness and 
 accident will sometimes disarrange the best 
 of human plans. Once in a while in travel- 
 ing you even miss your train. We could 
 hardly approve a rule that locked the 
 church door against every late comer, for 
 it might shut out some poor publican who 
 most needed to come in. Indeed you have 
 known some of the very saints of God who 
 because of bodily infirmity had to content 
 themselves with only part of a service ; and 
 
 48 
 
HALLOWED BE THY NAME 
 
 the part they were hungriest for might 
 sometimes be the Lord's Supper at the end, 
 so they are compelled to come late. 
 
 But making allowance for all such oc- 
 casional accidents and exceptions, it is not 
 putting the matter too strongly to say that 
 where Christian people have agreed to 
 unite at some specified time in showing 
 honor to the name of our God, those who 
 are really anxious that his name should be 
 honored will take pains to be at the place 
 of rendezvous on time. We should be most 
 unwilling to form part of a belated and 
 hurried procession struggling noisily 
 toward their places two or three or five or 
 ten minutes after time, thus confusing 
 the thoughts, and hindering the worship, 
 and perhaps ruffling the spirits of their 
 prompter fellow-Christians who had taken 
 pains enough to be in their places on time. 
 The rule for catching a train is ''better ten 
 minutes early than one minute late"; and 
 that is a good rule for church going. "I 
 
 49 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 myself will awake early." "Early will I 
 seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, . . . 
 in a dry and thirsty land, where no 
 water is; to see thy power and thy glory, 
 so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary." 
 Yes, this is the first of all the petitions 
 in the Lord's Prayer, and it prescribes 
 a very resolute promptness in our public 
 worship. 
 
 But this prayer for the hallowing of 
 God's name ought to be finding an answer 
 in many other ways and other places be- 
 sides the public services of the church, or 
 even our own habits of daily speech. We 
 ought to have that due sense of all God's 
 mercies "that our hearts may be un- 
 feignedly thankful, and that we show 
 forth his praise, not only with our lips, 
 but in our lives; by giving up our- 
 selves to his service, and walking before 
 him in holiness and righteousness all our 
 days." "Hallowed by thy name," and by 
 the very ordinance of baptism that sacred 
 
 50 
 
HALLOWED BE THY NAME 
 
 name has already been placed on almost 
 every disciple. Every man or woman who 
 can be called in any sense a Christian is to 
 that extent a namesake of Christ, a name- 
 sake of God. 
 
 How much it means sometimes to be the 
 namesake of a man; that a child should 
 bear a name that has been greatly honored 
 among men because of the honored father 
 who bore it before him. There is no sad- 
 der tragedy in this world than when such 
 a child, by his own unworthiness, drags the 
 honored name that he bears into the mud. 
 It is a strong motive to honorable en- 
 deavor, when the child is of any fineness of 
 sentiment, that he has been charged with 
 so sacred a responsibility that it rests with 
 him to honor or to disgrace his father's 
 name. 
 
 So Christ has made us aware of a like 
 responsibility as namesakes of our Father 
 God. If a man have any fineness of senti- 
 ment at all this must give him a very strong 
 
 51 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 motive for honorable endeavor. "Let your 
 light so shine before men." Why! that they 
 may praise you for your brilliance? No; 
 that is not the reason given ; that would be 
 rather a petty and childish motive for a 
 Christian ; but ' ' that they may see your good 
 works, and may glorify your Father which 
 is in heaven"; that the name of your great 
 namesake may not be dishonored in you. 
 It is a very searching prayer — a prayer 
 that concerns itself with every single word 
 and deed of our own daily life — when as 
 God's namesakes we pray, "Hallowed be 
 thy name." 
 
 It concerns, too, our feeling toward our 
 neighbors; for whether they know it or 
 not, every one of them still bears about 
 upon him, however defaced, something of 
 the divine image and superscription. The 
 stamp on the old coin was Caesar's, but the 
 stamp on the man is God's. And when we 
 pray that God 's name may be hallowed we 
 are laying upon ourselves some grave re- 
 
 52 
 
HALLOWED BE THY NAME 
 
 sponsibilities as regards our treatment of 
 that fellow-man. 
 
 "Lord, teach us to pray," said the dis- 
 ciples; and our Lord's teaching in the 
 whole subject of prayer was by his own 
 example, and once he set an example for 
 the offering of this first petition that God's 
 name might be hallowed. It was in those 
 last days of his life, when it was growing 
 clearer to him that if the corn of wheat 
 was ever to bring forth much fruit it must 
 fall into the ground and die. In that 
 dreadful apprehension he cried, "Now is 
 my soul troubled; and what shall I say? 
 Father, save me from this hour: but for 
 this cause came I unto this hour. Father, 
 glorify thy name." That was what he 
 should say. That was the petition in which 
 Jesus himself could find rest from all his 
 perplexities; "Father, hallowed be thy 
 
 53 
 
CHAPTER ni 
 Ubs fttngoom Come 
 
 The second petition in the Lord's Prayer 
 has to do with the great subject of our 
 Lord's teaching — the kingdom. At the 
 very outset we read how he "went about all 
 Galilee, . . . preaching the gospel of the 
 kingdom." We read on through the par- 
 ables and find one after another telling of 
 the kingdom. But what does the term 
 mean? What did Jesus mean when he 
 bade his disciples pray for the coming of 
 this kingdom? 
 
 Our Lord's Jewish hearers would have 
 been apt to suppose that they understood 
 the meaning of the prayer, for it was a 
 prayer that they had long been in the habit 
 of offering. And every time they offered 
 it they would be thinking how their own 
 people lay helpless and ashamed under the 
 
THY KINGDOM COME 
 
 heathen power of Rome. To their minds 
 the coming of God's kingdom would mean 
 that he would in some way manifest his 
 divine power to break that hated Roman 
 yoke and make his people Israel once more 
 an independent and powerful nation, as they 
 had been a thousand years before in the 
 glorious times of David and Solomon, 
 with some anointed son of David a king on 
 the throne, so mighty in conquest that all 
 the other nations of the world must bring 
 their tribute up to Jerusalem. Something 
 like that was what every devout Jew had in 
 mind when he prayed for the coming of the 
 kingdom. Listening to Jesus, after a while 
 some of them began to question whether 
 he, showing, as he did, such strange power 
 over men's souls, might not be the long- 
 hoped-for Messiah, God's appointed king 
 to deliver and rule his people Israel. At 
 one time many of the common people hoped 
 that this was so; and even the hostile 
 rulers could not quite repress their fears 
 
 55 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 that it might be so; that Jesus himself 
 might be the king who was sent to rule over 
 this long-hoped-for kingdom of God. 
 
 This expectation that Jesus might be the 
 king was rudely shaken by his crucifixion, 
 but not permanently destroyed ; for it soon 
 revived among his disciples in the form of 
 a belief that he who had been shamefully 
 crucified would speedily come again to 
 reign in power and great glory. In some 
 sense this hope of our Lord's second com- 
 ing in power is a hope that we are all bid- 
 den to cherish. But sometimes the disciples 
 have read into this hope some of the worst 
 errors of the old Jews — that selfish Jewish 
 provincialism, that crude Jewish material- 
 ism, which Jesus was always rebuking and 
 correcting. We used to suppose that these 
 more extreme millennarian opinions were 
 characteristic of the more ignorant and 
 fanatical sects. But strangely enough sim- 
 ilar views have lately come to be the 
 fashion among certain scholars who con- 
 
 56 
 
THY KINGDOM COME 
 
 sider themselves especially advanced. 
 They do not shrink from declaring that 
 our Lord himself based his own gospel on 
 such Apocalyptic extravagances as you find 
 in the book of Enoch. 
 
 They will hardly persuade us. What 
 Jesus had in mind when he preached the 
 kingdom of God was not the triumph of an 
 oriental dynasty, exalting its favorites and 
 destroying its rivals. The heart of the 
 Christian world knows better. The late 
 Professor Bruce spoke for a sounder 
 scholarship when he said "that the out- 
 standing characteristics of the kingdom, as 
 Jesus conceived it, were spirituality and 
 universality." Men asked, "When is it com- 
 ing?" and he answered: "It is now here in 
 the midst of you"; "It cometh not with ob- 
 servation"; "It is like a seed cast into the 
 ground, growing, men know not how " ; "It 
 is like the mustard seed, too small to be 
 noticed, but growing up to the full measure 
 of a tree"; "It is like heaven hidden in 
 
 57 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 three measures of meal, and working 
 through the mass till the whole is leav- 
 ened. ' ' What is the kingdom ! You ask an 
 apostle, and he answers, "It is righteous- 
 ness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." 
 In other words, it is essentially spiritual in 
 its nature, and therefore universal in its 
 operations. And whenever and wherever 
 those divine qualities exist among men 
 there the divine kingdom is already estab- 
 lishing itself; but we are still to pray for 
 its coming, because those divine qualities 
 need always to be made more common 
 everywhere among men than they are any- 
 where yet. Righteousness and peace and 
 the joy that is in the Holy Ghost are too 
 rare as yet. 
 
 Maurice has said somewhere that our 
 Lord, in preaching the kingdom, was "the 
 Revealer and Asserter of the divine order ; 
 that he entered into conflict with the anom- 
 alies which disturbed that order." "The 
 divine order," meditate on that phrase. 
 
 58 
 
THY KINGDOM COME 
 
 Another has well said that 8 "Jesus em- 
 ployed the phrase kingdom of God, or of 
 heaven to indicate that perfect order of 
 things which he was about to establish in 
 which all those of every nation who should 
 believe in him were to be gathered to- 
 gether," and so forth. And so our Lord 
 himself says in his great Parable of the 
 Judgment, that when the day comes that 
 shall gather all nations before the throne of 
 glory — in other words, when the kingdom 
 is come — the king shall say to those on the 
 right, "Come, because ye fed me when 
 hungry," and so forth; and to those on 
 the left, "Depart, because ye did not." 
 That is, when the kingdom is come visibly 
 and in the largest sense, and when 
 the principle of the kingdom is fully re- 
 vealed, it will prove to be this simple rule 
 of fairness and kindness and peace; for 
 the king himself when he appears shall 
 
 8 Thayer 's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testa- 
 ment. 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 speak that out as his own will, and beyond 
 question the will of the king must be always 
 and everywhere the law of the kingdom. 
 
 And really, however it be with conflicting 
 schools of interpreters, the larger world 
 outside has not found it impossible to get 
 at Christ's meaning in this phrase. Rather 
 it is a phrase that well-disposed people 
 seem to delight in more and more. Perhaps 
 for the reason that other kings have gone 
 out of fashion we incline more to talk of the 
 kingdom of God. A kingdom means au- 
 thority; it means an order that must not 
 be violated, laws that cannot be set aside 
 even by the largest majorities; and such 
 laws and such authority we must have. 
 
 We have learned to use the same expres- 
 sive word in other connections. We divide 
 the whole visible universe into kingdoms — 
 the mineral kingdom, and the vegetable, 
 and the animal. No one would think of 
 saying the animal democracy, or the vege- 
 table republic; the principles that rule in 
 
 60 
 
THY KINGDOM COME 
 
 those domains are not to be passed upon 
 by any noisy parliament of beasts or of 
 plants ; those laws are not to be debated but 
 obeyed. So Jesus has taught us that if we 
 wish well to the world of mankind we must 
 pray for the coming of the kingdom of God 
 among men. And I venture to think that 
 this parliamentary era in which you and I 
 live needs more than any age that preceded 
 it to dwell upon this thought and offer this 
 prayer. 
 
 But before speaking further on this point 
 let us turn for a moment to the third peti- 
 tion of the prayer, for the second and the 
 third cannot well be held apart, "Thy will 
 be done in earth, as it is in heaven. " " In 
 earth, as in heaven," Jesus says, and that 
 phrase "in heaven" looks back toward the 
 opening address to "our Father which art 
 in heaven." But where is that place 
 heaven? The word means originally the 
 great expanse of the sky over our heads; 
 and when men supposed that the earth was 
 
 61 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 flat and immovable, perhaps as often as 
 they turned their eyes upward they felt 
 sure that they were looking toward the 
 exact locality of heaven. We who know 
 that we rush through a black abyss of space 
 on a whirling ball, would grow dizzy if we 
 should attempt any such precise location of 
 the throne of God. "Upward?" Which 
 way is upward? Is it as we look, or as the 
 antipodes look? As it is always when the 
 talk is of spiritual truth, we are listening 
 to the language of figure when we speak of 
 the sky as the place where our Father is. 
 But the old figure need lose none of its ex- 
 pressiveness because of the newer astron- 
 omy. For a man to look upward means as 
 much now in our common thought as it 
 ever meant before Copernicus was born. 
 "To look up, not down," to "seek those 
 things which are above"; you do not need 
 an interpreter to tell you what those words 
 mean. They mean a confession that there 
 are some things above you, and that you 
 
 62 
 
THY KINGDOM COME 
 
 will have to climb to reach them. So they 
 mean a confession of your own present 
 inferiority. It is the language of humility 
 and of aspiration when you talk of looking 
 up. The other attitude would be of con- 
 scious superiority, to look down; or of 
 rivalry, to look about on a level, comparing 
 ourselves either in a complacent or quar- 
 relsome fashion with those who would be 
 counted our equals. But the moment you 
 begin to look up you have to remember that 
 it is you who are down. Now Christ has 
 taught us to direct our prayers upward, to 
 a Father who is in heaven. Far up in the 
 sky — for no eye can reach to the top of that 
 altitude. To use another fine Hebrew term, 
 he is the Most High God. To look toward 
 the Most High, every other being must turn 
 his eyes upward. The very first phrase 
 of the Lord's Prayer, turning our thoughts 
 upward, puts us into a mood of humility, 
 and of unending aspiration. "Our Father 
 which art in heaven." 
 
 63 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 But now we return to this third petition 
 that God's will may be "done in earth, as 
 it is in heaven;" and do you not see the 
 magnificent idealism of it, the unlimited 
 discontent of it? For the very wording of 
 the prayer throws us out of any possible 
 complacency with such inferior doing of 
 God's will as has yet been attained any- 
 where on earth. Heaven, the very top of 
 the sky, is a place where God 's will is done 
 properly; and when our Lord imposed on 
 us the habit of thinking of heaven every 
 time we begin to pray, it shows that a per- 
 fect doing of God's will, and nothing short 
 of that, is the measure that you and I are 
 to try for, if our prayer is sincere, this 
 very morning. 
 
 For, of course, if a man prays honestly 
 for the doing of God's will the first place 
 where he must hope for that doing of God's 
 will is in himself. We pray against any 
 half-hearted compromise by ourselves with 
 disobedience ; as if we ourselves were to be 
 
 64 
 
THY KINGDOM COME 
 
 content to do God's will a little and stop 
 with that; to serve God in one or two mat- 
 ters, but for the rest serve Mammon. No, 
 no ; for in our prayer we have deliberately 
 set before ourselves this perfect measure of 
 obedience, "as it is in heaven," at the 
 summit of perfection, in the very home of 
 the Most High; and nothing short of that 
 will suit us for our own obeying. One of 
 the old fathers 9 uses the beautiful com- 
 parison that "as the sailors pulling at the 
 anchor rope do not drag the anchor to 
 them, but drag themselves up to the anchor ; 
 so those who are offering this petition do 
 not drag God's will down to the level of 
 their own desire, but drag themselves up to 
 the holy will of God. ' ' And as this Lord 's 
 Prayer is a pattern of all true Christian 
 praying, so it may show that the end of 
 all our praying is not that our will should 
 be done by God, but that God's will should 
 be done in us. Under the light of that 
 
 9 Clem. Alex. Strom IV, 23. 
 65 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 great truth how many of the mysteries and 
 perplexities of this subject disappear; 
 when we remember that the final end of all 
 true praying is not that our will should 
 be done by God, but that God's will should 
 be done in us. May the Lord himself teach 
 us to pray from our hearts that God's will 
 may be done in us and by us here on earth 
 as it is done in heaven. 
 
 We have already recalled our Lord's ex- 
 ample as the most effective part of his 
 teaching. If you took this form of words 
 as a form merely it might soon have been 
 forgotten or never learned; but Jesus' 
 own example in prayer was what men 
 could not forget. Because he was always 
 crying, ' ' Abba, Father, ' ' therefore we have 
 been remembering to say, "Our Father"; 
 and because he prayed, "Thy will be 
 done," therefore we have been learning, 
 but with slow and stammering utterance, to 
 pray after him, "God's will be done." 
 
 You remember how and when Jesus of- 
 
THY KINGDOM COME 
 
 fered that particular prayer. No doubt he 
 was always offering it every day in his own 
 heart ; but the place where he spoke it out 
 loud, so that others overheard him and the 
 record has come down to us, was in the 
 Garden of Gethsemane — "Father, if this 
 cup may not pass away from me, except I 
 drink it, thy will be done." There is his 
 own example for that third petition. It 
 may not always be wholesome for us to try 
 to anticipate our graver spiritual crises 
 prematurely. In praying as in other 
 things the better rule may be to take no 
 thought for the morrow. Providence ap- 
 points for us bright days with the Beati- 
 tudes as well as dark nights in Gethsemane ; 
 and while the day lasts let us rejoice in the 
 light of it. But some day or night every 
 man must expect to come to the place where 
 for him to pray honestly for the doing of 
 God 's will shall mean to follow the example 
 of Christ in the Garden; and whenever 
 that day comes you may well thank God 
 
 67 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 that you have such an example as his to 
 follow. 
 
 So the perfect doing of God's will for 
 which we pray ought to begin in our own 
 hearts; but, of course, it ought not to end 
 there; and that brings us back once more 
 from the third petition to the second, with 
 its broader thought of the kingdom. We 
 are now ready to understand what the king- 
 dom for which we pray must be ; a state of 
 affairs, all the world over, among all na- 
 tions and among all men, when God's will 
 shall be done on earth as it is done in 
 heaven. 
 
 For our prayer is that this kingdom 
 should come on earth; we need not pray 
 that it may come in heaven since it is there 
 now. Heaven, wherever it be located, 
 means the place where God's throne stands 
 now, where his rule has never been ques- 
 tioned. But we pray that the kingdom may 
 come also upon earth, in this rebellious and 
 desolated province on the far-off edge of 
 
THY KINGDOM COME 
 
 all things. That God's kingdom may come 
 here is what we are to pray for, and with 
 nothing short of that can we as Christians 
 ever be content. 
 
 By what means that kingdom of God is 
 to be established on earth we may not 
 clearly know. It might have been estab- 
 lished — it is not impossible to conceive of 
 it — as those devout Jews of the earlier time 
 anticipated, by the wisdom and virtue and 
 overwhelming personal influence of some 
 noble human leader, some later and better 
 son of David. It might be so, for one can 
 hardly set limits to the influence that may 
 be exerted by a man, if he be man enough. 
 Or the kingdom might be established — yes, 
 may be, I do not care to contradict it — as 
 the early Christians generally supposed, by 
 the visible return of Jesus in the clouds, 
 thus renewing his personal influence upon 
 the hearts of men. That might be the 
 method. But by whatever means it may 
 be brought about, the essential characteris- 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 tic of this kingdom is that men's hearts are 
 to be so transformed by the spirit of Jesus 
 that in all their relations to each other 
 God's will shall be done in them and by 
 them here on earth, as it is done in heaven. 
 Without that, no matter what else happens, 
 the kingdom would not come, and with 
 that, no matter what else does not hap- 
 pen, the kingdom would be here. That 
 God's will should be done in men and 
 by men and among men everywhere here 
 on earth as it is in heaven, will be the 
 kingdom of God, and the answer to our 
 prayer. 
 
 But what is God's will! Who will tell 
 us that? We offer this petition that God's 
 will may be done, but who shall show us 
 what the will is ? For ' ' no man hath seen 
 God at any time, ' ' and therefore what man 
 can have any sure knowledge as to what 
 God's will should be like? There it is that 
 we come back once more to our conscious 
 dependence upon Jesus. For we do know 
 
 70 
 
THY KINGDOM COME 
 
 him, and the God to whom we are praying 
 is the Being whom Jesus called Father. 
 And we are sure the Son is like the Father, 
 which means that the Father is like the Son ; 
 there is no slightest division of sentiment 
 between them : their will is all one. And so 
 this kingdom for which we are taught to 
 pray, the disciples themselves would some- 
 times speak of as the kingdom of God, and 
 sometimes as the kingdom of Christ — they 
 seem to use the terms indiscriminately, as 
 if it mattered not which phrase they used. 
 The final result — the full meaning — was the 
 same either way, for the will of Christ is 
 the will of God ; and what the will of Christ 
 was, and is, we know. 
 
 At least we can know if we wish to know 
 it ; the means of discovering it are all here. 
 This Gospel is one long declaration of the 
 will of Jesus Christ as to what men ought 
 to be as God's children, and what they 
 ought to do, and how they ought to bear 
 themselves, one toward another, as God's 
 
 71 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 children. The will of Jesus is not hidden 
 from us ; and the heart of the world begins 
 to understand that all our own highest 
 dreams of freedom, justice, liberty, equal- 
 ity, fraternity, human blessedness, are in- 
 cluded in what Jesus willed for his fellows. 
 So men of all sorts are claiming Jesus as 
 their own representative, the great Ee- 
 former, Socialist, Emancipator, Leveler; 
 whatever their favorite title for the atti- 
 tude of discontent against wrong, they 
 claim Jesus for that. And they do not mis- 
 judge him in making such a claim. But 
 what some of them still need to learn from 
 Jesus is that all this freedom and justice 
 and blessedness can be possible only in 
 what he called the kingdom — a kingdom of 
 God. No nation will ever be fit to govern 
 itself freely except as its citizens are sev- 
 erally learning how to obey God. We as 
 freemen are not fit to make laws for each 
 other until we ourselves have some sense of 
 the sacred authority of the law of right- 
 
 72 
 
THY KINGDOM COME 
 
 eousness itself as established by God. Just 
 as you will not have any true brotherhood 
 of men except through the fatherhood of 
 God, so you must not look for any true 
 democracy of men except through the king- 
 dom of God. Lacking that, you must expect 
 that your political agitations will give you 
 license, anarchy, intolerance, violence; and 
 then again imperialism, the man on horse- 
 back, the whole dreary circle to be gone 
 through again; for political science is 
 rather a dismal branch of study unless you 
 can attack it in the attitude of faith, and of 
 prayer for the kingdom of God. 
 
 So we do well to speak much of the king- 
 dom. Especially in this democratic age it 
 is a healthy instinct which has been leading 
 so many earnest people to magnify the 
 thought of a kingdom, to lift our hopes 
 often, above these wretched injustices and 
 disorders that now curse the world, to the 
 kingdom; a region somewhere above the 
 reach of noisy parliaments and congresses, 
 
 73 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 where laws are not to be debated and voted 
 upon but obeyed. We do well to remember 
 that the ' ' one far-off divine event to which 
 the whole creation moves ' ' is nothing short 
 of a kingdom of God. And day after day, 
 as often as we repeat the Lord's Prayer, 
 our hopes are lifted toward that region of 
 high and holy and triumphant ideal. 
 
 "Our Father which art in heaven, Hal- 
 lowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. 
 Thy will be done in earth, as it is in 
 heaven." 
 
 74 
 
CHAPTER IV, 
 @ur H>ailg JBreafc 
 
 The Lord's Prayer has begun with three 
 petitions which are concerned directly with 
 God, the hallowing of his name, the coming 
 of his kingdom, the doing of his will. 
 
 But now we are to study the latter part 
 of the prayer which is concerned more di- 
 rectly with ourselves and our own human 
 needs. Here also the petitions are three in 
 number, and the first of these is a prayer 
 for bread. Let no reader fail to observe 
 that this stands first of the three ; the other 
 two prayers which have to do more directly 
 with man's spiritual needs come later, but 
 these primary needs of the body are at- 
 tended to first. 
 
 In saying this we do not forget that the 
 whole prayer has begun by lifting our 
 thoughts toward heaven and God. The be- 
 
 75 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 ginning of all was spiritual and universal. 
 ' ' Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his 
 righteousness." But now when the time 
 comes that we may properly turn our 
 thought toward those things that are neces- 
 sary for ourselves, Christ allows us to 
 recognize frankly the physical basis of life, 
 man's daily need of bread for his body's 
 hunger. 
 
 This creature whom we call man has been 
 strangely compounded of spirit and body, 
 but in the order of nature the body claims 
 earliest attention. "Not first that which is 
 spiritual," the apostle says, "but that 
 which is natural ; and afterward that which 
 is spiritual." 
 
 And Jesus allows and encourages us to 
 recognize this same order even in our 
 habits of daily prayer. Some of us might 
 not have expected this teaching from him; 
 for we remember a certain record in an 
 earlier chapter of the Gospel which sounded 
 as if a request for bread could hardly be 
 
 76 
 
OUR DAILY BREAD 
 
 admitted to the Lord's Prayer at all; or, 
 if admitted, must creep in only as a sort 
 of appendix at the end. I refer to the 
 record of his own temptation in the wilder- 
 ness, when after long-continued fasting he 
 became aware of his own bitter hunger and 
 felt the impulse to use his miraculous power 
 for changing the stones of the wilderness 
 to bread that he might eat. But Jesu3 
 would not do this, answering rather that 
 man shall not live by bread alone. The 
 words might seem to argue a complete in- 
 difference to all these bodily needs, whether 
 his own or others. But evidently that 
 would not be a right understanding of 
 what our Lord said. Whatever be the 
 lesson of that temptation scene, it cannot 
 mean that Jesus was indifferent to men's 
 bodily necessities; for here stands this 
 petition first of the three, this cry for 
 bread. 
 
 And this order in the prayer is true to 
 Christ's own habitual conduct. The people 
 
 77 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 had noticed a contrast in this respect be- 
 tween him and his great forerunner, John 
 the Baptist; for John came neither eating 
 nor drinking. John inclined to the ascetic 
 ideal; he would forget, so far as possible, 
 that a man ever needed to eat at all. 
 John's scheme of reform was to exalt the 
 spirit by the utmost possible mortification 
 of the flesh. And there was a grandeur in 
 such resolute self-control which the people 
 felt, and to which our Lord himself after- 
 wards bore witness in the strongest terms. 
 But John's path was not the path which 
 Jesus himself chose to walk in. The peo- 
 ple themselves felt that he differed from 
 his predecessor; and some of them had 
 commented upon it unfavorably, saying 
 that "the Son of man came eating and 
 drinking." What his enemies proceeded 
 to say about him in this respect was a slan- 
 derous falsehood, but it was true that Jesus 
 differed somewhat sharply from John ; for 
 Jesus so frankly recognized the needs of 
 
 78 
 
OUR DAILY BREAD 
 
 the body, and wished that they should be 
 satisfied. 
 
 Indeed it is to be noted that Jesus was 
 one whom any host would be glad to invite 
 to his table; for we know that all sorts of 
 hosts did so invite him, one day a publican, 
 and another day a Pharisee. Nor were the 
 friends in Cana afraid that his presence 
 would cast any gloom over the festivities 
 of a wedding feast. 
 
 It is quite in character then, when our 
 Lord was offering a model of prayer that 
 should serve for all sorts and conditions of 
 people, that, among all the things that a 
 man might need for himself, he suggests 
 that we ask first for bread. 
 
 Can you not feel a more than human wis- 
 dom in that order? Does it not help to ex- 
 plain the saneness of Christian morality, as 
 contrasted with that of other men who have 
 felt intensely on religious subjects, a Mo- 
 hammedan dervish, for example, or a Hin- 
 doo Yogi f By Christian I mean, of course, 
 
 79 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 the morality of the New Testament; not 
 the more or less imperfect copies of it that 
 you might find in some convent or other 
 churchly modification of the New Testa- 
 ment. I mean the standard of morality 
 which plain men have found rising before 
 them when they have been content to take 
 their notions directly from this book. And 
 I say that as contrasted with the standards 
 of other men who show anything like the 
 same spiritual earnestness, the Christian 
 morality is apt to impress you as peculiarly 
 sane. And the reason is that it so frankly 
 recognizes these solid material facts at the 
 basis of our human life. Christian moral- 
 ity stands upon the earth ; it is not " up in 
 the air," as the saying is. With all its 
 glorious visions of the new Jerusalem it 
 does not forget that a living man will need 
 bread to eat. ' ' Moral ideas rule the world, ' ' 
 Emerson said somewhere, "but at close 
 range the senses are imperious"; Chris- 
 tianity remembers that, and knows how to 
 
 80 
 
OUR DAILY BREAD 
 
 deal with life at close range. When a man 
 is hungry its first thought is to have him 
 fed; and it knows that a man must grow 
 hungry unless he has food to eat. 
 
 ' ' Our daily bread. ' ' Commentators have 
 sometimes enlarged on the modesty of this 
 request. The prayer is only for bread, not 
 for stalled oxen, or for fatted calves, or for 
 any of the other emblems of luxury and 
 excess. And it is a modest request; yet I 
 cannot help thinking that the more signifi- 
 cant fact is not the modesty of the request, 
 but that this request should stand here at 
 all. 
 
 Our daily bread. That word "daily" 
 has stirred up a good deal of discussion 
 among the commentators — the Greek word, 
 I mean, epiousion — for no one has been 
 quite certain what the word means. The 
 word has not been found in other Greek 
 writings, or in the New Testament, except 
 in this one verse in Matthew and the cor- 
 responding verse in the Gospel of Luke. 
 
 81 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 We have to guess its meaning from the con- 
 text and the derivation. 
 
 From its derivation it might possibly 
 mean "our needful bread." You will find 
 that rendering suggested in the margin of 
 the Revised Version; you will also find 
 there as an alternative reading, ' ' our bread 
 for the coming day." Many good scholars 
 incline to this latter rendering, "Give us 
 to-day bread enough to last through to- 
 morrow." If that be what it means, it 
 would show how a man may hope to obey 
 Christ's other command that we "take no 
 anxious thought for to-morrow, saying, 
 what shall we eat," and so forth. For 
 the surest way to avoid all painful anxiety 
 about to-morrow's bread is to carry the 
 subject to the Lord in prayer now. 
 
 I do not know which rendering is the 
 more accurate, but practically they all 
 come to much the same thing ; our familiar 
 "daily" covers the whole thought well 
 enough. It is a modest request, but a very 
 
 82 
 
OUR DAILY BREAD 
 
 urgent one; for it stands here first among 
 all the things that we ask for ourselves, 
 and it is a prayer that we expect to repeat 
 every morning as long as we live : * ' Give us 
 this day our daily bread. ' ' 
 
 ' * Give us, ' ' for really the bread must be 
 a gift from God. The richest man in the 
 world, or the poorest, has no other source of 
 supply, no other ultimate source. "He 
 causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and 
 herb for the service of man." Whoever 
 does the sowing or the reaping, yet it is 
 "God that giveth the increase." Prone, 
 as we all are, to a foolish pride and self- 
 sufficiency, we ought to train our lips to this 
 entreaty for bread as a gift from God. The 
 kind Father of all must continue his bounty 
 else we the children will starve. And if we 
 can always remember that the food all 
 comes from him as a gift, perhaps it will 
 make some of us more thoughtful how we 
 take the gift, and what we do with it. If 
 the bread is all a gift from God, why should 
 
 83 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 I be clutching for more than I can possibly 
 eat, when some other child is left so 
 hungry! Can that be the will of the Giver 
 of the bread? 
 
 "Give us this day" — "us." It does not 
 say, "give me." As old Matthew Henry 
 says in his commentary, "This shows that 
 those who eat together are to pray to- 
 gether. ' ' Everyone has felt that the word- 
 ing of the Lord 's Prayer fits it wonderfully 
 for the uses of a praying household. For 
 one of the strongest bonds of family unity 
 is this custom of sitting down together to 
 eat. It would be a very poor substitute 
 for a home that should leave it for each to 
 devour his dinner by himself in some soli- 
 tary corner, like a dog growling over his 
 bone. No, the joy of the day's feast is, of 
 course, that we can come together to eat it ; 
 and so the Lord quietly assumes that every 
 household of his disciples will wish to begin 
 the day by coming together to ask for it. 
 "Give us," they say. Some other form of 
 
 Si 
 
OUR DAILY BREAD 
 
 words would have been more natural if he 
 had been issuing a manual for private de- 
 votion. 
 
 But when you say, "give us," are you 
 going to mean only the three or four or 
 eight or ten who live beneath your own roof, 
 and stop with them? When we started the 
 prayer by saying, "Our Father," did it 
 mean that God was the Father of those 
 three or four or eight or ten who make up 
 your own little family group and of no 
 more ! Plainly not ; it is to God the Father 
 of all that we pray, and it is to that same 
 God that we say, "Give us our bread." 
 Surely, if we stop to think of it, we must 
 know that that means more than me and 
 my own house. Yes, the request has a 
 modest sound, but really it is a very big 
 prayer nevertheless. In the name of all the 
 children we come to the Father of all and 
 ask for "our bread." 
 
 I can fancy two little hungry-looking 
 urchins appearing at my door some sharp 
 85 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 morning, speaking this same prayer for 
 bread; and I, pitying their hunger, issue 
 my orders that it be set before them, as 
 much as I suppose that two such small ob- 
 jects could eat. This is done, but still they 
 stand waiting. And when I ask with some 
 impatience what they are waiting for, is 
 not this enough? they tell me that there 
 are a dozen more of them at home. For 
 it appears that these two, rather abler- 
 bodied than the rest, were sent out as mes- 
 sengers in behalf of all of them ; and they 
 are afraid that these two portions fur- 
 nished for them would not go round. So it 
 meant more than I at iirst supposed when 
 they begged, "Give us bread." 
 
 Are there not many times more than a 
 dozen other children in the background 
 every time that you and I come to our 
 Father and say, "We are hungry, give us 
 bread"? If we are faithful to the errand 
 on which we have been sent that will be a 
 very big prayer. But I am afraid we of- 
 
 86 
 
OUR DAILY BREAD 
 
 ferers of this prayer have not remembered 
 always how big a prayer it is; we have 
 contracted that generous word "us" too 
 nearly to the dimensions of the smaller 
 "me." 
 
 Perhaps the Lord has shown that he un- 
 derstood the prayer more generously than 
 the petitioner understood it. When I said, 
 "Give us," thinking of only my small 
 house, he was thinking of all those other 
 children. And so in answer to my request 
 he in his wise providence gave me bread 
 for myself and for my house, and as much 
 more as I seemed able to carry for all the 
 others also. But what have I done with it 
 all? 
 
 If when those two little beggars appeared 
 at my door I had known about the other 
 hungry children at home, and knowing had 
 loaded the two down with enough and to 
 spare for themselves and the dozen others 
 also; and if, going out the door an hour 
 later, I had found the messengers still 
 
 8T 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 seated on the steps endeavoring to crowd 
 the whole provision into their own small 
 persons, I should have something to say to 
 the little gluttons; but would that be so 
 very different from the spectacle on which 
 God looks down as regards the distribution 
 that we men have sometimes made of his 
 bountiful answer to our prayer for bread? 
 It should quiet some of us with a deeper 
 sense of responsibility when we think how 
 big a prayer you and I have offered this 
 morning when we, in a world of hungry 
 people, prayed to the„ Father of all, "Give 
 us our bread." 
 
 But now that our thoughts have been 
 enlarged to take in all the other hungry 
 children, will you notice once more that this 
 first request that we are taught to make 
 (for them as well as for ourselves) is for 
 bread? That is to say, under Christ's sane 
 leadership our Christian good will for our 
 fellow-men starts out with a frank recogni- 
 tion of their physical necessities. There 
 
OUR DAILY BREAD 
 
 will be other things, and greater things, to 
 come after. "Man shall not live by bread 
 only," as Christ said. Other things come 
 later ; but when a man is very hungry you 
 can hardly expect to bring in these other 
 things before. At close range the senses 
 are imperious and will not be denied. 
 When our Lord saw the hillside covered 
 with a great multitude of people who had 
 had nothing to eat all day, he was moved 
 with great pity for them. He said that he 
 was unwilling to send them away fasting. 
 He ordered his disciples to go and see how 
 many loaves of bread they had, and then he 
 made the multitudes sit down and he fed 
 them, enough and to spare. All four of the 
 Gospels tell the story; we count it one of 
 the greatest of our Lord's wonderful 
 works; one of the clearest signs to show 
 what his feeling was toward men and how 
 he would wish to deal with them. And you 
 find in that miracle of the loaves this same 
 frank recognition of the physical basis of 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 life that we find in the prayer. It shows 
 that in the order of time the needs of the 
 body will sometimes take precedence of the 
 higher needs of the spirit; that at close 
 range the senses are imperious ; that there 
 are conditions when all the other interests 
 of human life will have to await the pro- 
 viding of a loaf of bread. 
 
 James, that most practical of apostles, 
 spoke quite in the manner of his Master 
 when he said, "If a brother or sister be 
 naked, and destitute of daily food, and one 
 of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be 
 ye warmed and filled" — in other words, 
 you speak them an edifying sermon — "not- 
 withstanding ye give them not those things 
 which are needful to the body; what doth 
 it profit?" James shows this same sane 
 and practical regard for those things that 
 are needful to the body which Christ has 
 taught us in the order of petitions in his 
 prayer. 
 
 We sometimes hear criticisms of the more 
 
 90 
 
OUR DAILY BREAD 
 
 practical church activities of our day on the 
 ground that all these philanthropic and 
 humanitarian enterprises are outside the 
 church's proper sphere. I should like to 
 quote an answer to such criticisms which 
 came not long ago from the rector of Grace 
 Church, New York City, a man very highly 
 esteemed for sobriety of judgment. "The 
 institutional church," he writes, "has to 
 bear two reproaches. On the one side are 
 the socialists with their cry that the day 
 has gone by for ecclesiastical methods of 
 doing good, that what is wanted is not 
 charity but justice. ... On the other hand 
 are those who complain that for the Lady 
 Ecclesia to soil her hands with work of any 
 sort is infra dignitatem, and that what is 
 wanted in these religiously dead days is not 
 the institutional but the inspirational 
 church. To the socialists' complaint we 
 answer: 'Go ahead with your scheme for 
 making society perfect by legislation at the 
 hands of imperfect men. If you can work 
 
 91 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 your Utopia without the preliminary 
 trouble of converting selfish people into un- 
 selfish ones, do so.' . . . 
 
 "To the inspirationists, on the other 
 hand, we answer: 'Yes, you are right. 
 Institutionalism of any and every sort is 
 but a poor affair unless it has the breath of 
 God back of it to propel, and within it to 
 enliven.' But why assume that churches 
 which try 'to do things' are bereft of that 
 blessed possession,? Why doubt that it is 
 possible for a city church to be at once in- 
 spirational and institutional, alive to the 
 deep things of the spirit and alive also to 
 the everyday needs of man?" 
 
 Those are wise words and worthy of 
 careful consideration by all churches and 
 all Christians. Every church may be, and 
 ought to be, both alive to the deep things 
 of the spirit, and also alive to the everyday 
 needs of man. In all the churches of Christ 
 his disciples are to go on offering the 
 prayer which he has taught us, a prayer for 
 
 92 
 
OUR DAILY BREAD 
 
 everyday needs; and as often as we offer 
 it we must try to remember the many other 
 hungry children. "Our Father, give us 
 this day our daily bread." 
 
 93 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 forgive Ws ©ur 2)ebts 
 
 We are studying now the latter part of 
 the Lord 's Prayer, which has to do more di- 
 rectly with ourselves and our own human 
 necessities. First came our bodily necessi- 
 ties, for the first of these petitions was a 
 prayer for bread. But following hard upon 
 that first petition comes one that springs 
 out of a spiritual necessity for forgiveness. 
 This prayer for forgiveness is closely 
 joined by the conjunction "and" to the 
 previous prayer for bread. "And for- 
 give," "intimating," says Matthew Henry 
 in one of his quaint comments, "that we 
 must pray for daily pardon as duly as 
 we pray for daily bread." What do 
 those complacent individuals purpose to do 
 with this prayer, who have persuaded 
 themselves that they have already arrived 
 
 94 
 
FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 
 
 at perfect holiness and need no daily 
 pardon? 
 
 When we come to this request for pardon 
 for the first time it may seem that our 
 Lord's own example has partly failed us. 
 Among all the prayers that he offered while 
 on earth we have no record of any that in- 
 cluded any sort of confession of personal 
 sin. Explain it how you will, that is the one 
 most striking phenomenon connected with 
 the life story of Jesus Christ; that he 
 whose presence was always throwing other 
 men — and even down to our own day con- 
 tinues to throw other men — into a mood of 
 personal confession of unworthiness, never 
 once offered any such confession for him- 
 self. "Which of you convinceth me of 
 sin?" he cried to his adversaries, and no 
 one has yet taken up the challenge success- 
 fully. 
 
 No, when Christ would offer us a con- 
 crete example to show how we must do our 
 praying for pardon, he does not bid us look 
 
 95 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 at himself, the Master, but at a certain 
 publican who had gone into the temple one 
 day to pray ; and who durst not lift up his 
 eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his 
 breast, and said, "God be merciful to me 
 a sinner." "To me a sinner." The 
 parable teaches that in praying for forgive- 
 ness one need not be very much afraid of 
 egotism; the first person singular has a 
 good right to stand* in that prayer, and the 
 publican used it there. The Pharisee did 
 not; he preferred to keep his confessions 
 of sin in the third person. Other men are 
 the sinners, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, 
 "this publican"; the Pharisee was fluent 
 at confessing the sins of these other men, 
 and he thanked God that he himself was 
 not like them. And probably such phari- 
 saic confessions in the third person have 
 been offered even in our day. 
 
 A little prayer meeting was organized a 
 good many years ago, at a time of spiritual 
 interest, by some small boys living on Mur- 
 
 96 
 
FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 
 
 ray Hill, New York; and on one occasion 
 two of these boys had drawn into their 
 meeting a youthful neighbor whom they did 
 not regard as being in a hopeful state of 
 grace, thinking that the meeting might do 
 him good. There were only the three of 
 them present that day, the two small saints 
 and this small sinner. The present report 
 of the meeting comes from one of the two 
 saints, who is now a doctor of divinity, 
 highly honored throughout the church. He 
 reports that the service began properly 
 enough with prayers of confession from the 
 two saints; but each of them took it upon 
 him to confess the other 's sins, not his own ; 
 and they did this with such unmistakable 
 and pointed frankness that the moment the 
 second "amen" had been spoken the two 
 jumped from their knees and flew at each 
 other 's faces in a fistic encounter which had 
 to be checked by the kindly intervention of 
 the small sinner whom they had brought in 
 to be converted. The children are instruct- 
 
 97 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 ive because of their transparency. The 
 human virtues and the human foibles 
 show through. And here were two little 
 Pharisees of the nineteenth century who 
 had not yet learned the great publican les- 
 son that confession, like charity, begins at 
 home. We must try to learn that lesson, 
 and never to let the truth slip out of our 
 memory, when we are confessing sins, that 
 we are to begin with our own ; that we are 
 to do our confessing not as Pharisees, but 
 as Christians. "God be merciful to me a 
 sinner. ' ' 
 
 And yet in the prayer it says, "our 
 debts," not my debts. For in all these 
 petitions of the Lord's Prayer, God's 
 children are expected to be praying to- 
 gether, sharing, so far as we can, each 
 other's burdens. There are such things as 
 common burdens of debt, or of ill desert; 
 and a man of Christian temper will not be 
 too careful to excuse himself from his own 
 fair share in them. If the whole family be 
 
FOBGIVE US OUR DEBTS 
 
 found at fault in any way, or the whole 
 church or the whole community, it is fair to 
 assume that some part of the blame rests 
 on me, a member of the group ; and that I 
 will need some of the forgiving. The 
 Pharisee tried to forget that; he would 
 make haste to say, "I am not as bad as the 
 rest of them, thank God;" but the Chris- 
 tian would say rather, ' ' Forgive us ; I am 
 one of them." 
 
 That was a deep cry of penitence which 
 came from the prophet Isaiah when he saw 
 the vision of the Most Holy God, and cried, 
 "Woe is me! for ... I am a man of un- 
 clean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a 
 people of unclean lips." The prophet felt 
 that his own soul was smirched by the 
 black stain of his people's impurity. 
 
 Was there ever a more truly Christian 
 confession of public guilt than that which 
 was offered by that great President of the 
 United States who in his second inaugural 
 spoke of the offense of slavery, and how 
 
 99 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 God was giving "to both North and South 
 this terrible war as the woe due to those by 
 whom the offense came"? Mr. Lincoln's 
 own sentiment is more clearly revealed in 
 a letter which he wrote to a friend a few 
 days later, in which he said that this was a 
 truth which he thought needed to be told, 
 "and, as whatever of humiliation there is 
 in it falls most directly on myself, ' ' he says, 
 "I thought others might afford for me to 
 tell it." It is the language of a Christian, 
 not a Pharisee ; a man who knows how to put 
 his confessions of sin into the first person. 
 Yes, and even our Master himself, 
 though he had no sin of his own to confess, 
 came very near to accepting a share of the 
 responsibility for the sins of the rest of us. 
 And the people felt this, all the people felt 
 it. Even the guiltiest of them, when they 
 looked upon Jesus, were apt to gain some 
 sense of the completeness of his sympathy 
 with them. One of them spoke of him long 
 afterwards as a Being who was "holy, 
 100 
 
FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 
 
 harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners" ; 
 but another also said of him that he "bare 
 our sins in his own body on the tree." 
 Even though Jesus was undefiled and could 
 never ask forgiveness for any sin of his 
 own, yet it has been a most precious ele- 
 ment of the Christian faith that his prayer 
 has been going up with ours as often as we 
 make common cause in our need of pardon 
 and pray God to forgive us our debts. 
 
 It is to be noted that the word in this 
 petition is "debts." In Luke's shorter 
 version of the prayer the word is "sins"; 
 but here in Matthew's fuller report it is 
 "debts." And do we not find "debts" the 
 larger, more searching word? For it will 
 include the meaning of the other word. 
 Every sin becomes of necessity also a debt ; 
 for the sin was a withholding of some 
 obedience that we owed to the divine com- 
 mand, and leaves us hopelessly insolvent to 
 God unless it can be forgiven. But some 
 things that we had not thought of as posi- 
 101 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 tive sins are debts. When a man, talking 
 of his own faults, calls them sins, you might 
 take that to refer only to the positively 
 wicked things that this man had done ; but 
 when he calls his faults debts, you cannot 
 help thinking also of the many good things 
 that he had failed to do. 
 
 If some day I snatch a man's purse, 
 everybody knows that to be a sin ; but sup- 
 pose I had only failed to pay that man the 
 money that I owe him, what is that? At 
 least everybody must know that that leaves 
 me in debt to him. So if some day I push 
 a man into the water and he is drowned, 
 that is a sin, the sin of murder; but sup- 
 pose he has fallen into the water, and I, 
 seeing it, would not take the trouble to help 
 him out, what is that? If some day I deny 
 my Lord's name or blasphemously dis- 
 honor it, that is a sin. But suppose he is 
 looking for some friend to confess his name 
 and I hold my peace, what is that? Evi- 
 dently I owe him something that I have 
 102 
 
FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 
 
 not paid. This idea of debts and the pay- 
 ing of them is a broader idea than that of 
 merely not committing overt acts of sin. 
 There are sins of omission, and the lan- 
 guage of the prayer reminds us that they 
 are real sins, too, and that they need God's 
 forgiveness quite as much as the sins of 
 positive commission. 
 
 Indeed in Christ's Judgment Parable, 
 which sheds so much light on the meaning 
 of his prayer, these sins of omission are the 
 only sins referred to. The wicked who 
 stand on the left hand of the Judge are not 
 charged with any positive wrongdoing. No 
 doubt some of them had done their share 
 of evil deeds, but these are not referred to 
 in the trial. The good things that they had 
 not done make up all the counts in that in- 
 dictment. "I was an hungered, and ye gave 
 me no meat : I was thirsty, and ye gave me 
 no drink : . . . Inasmuch as ye did it not. ' ' 
 They had left undone the things that they 
 ought to have done, that was the gravest 
 
 103 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 charge against them; that was what made 
 them such miserable sinners. That was the 
 great debt which needed to be forgiven. 
 
 The daily repetition of this word debts 
 ought to make our consciences more sensi- 
 tive to that side of our daily obligation 
 which includes the things that we ought to 
 do, so that if we fail to do them there is our 
 sin. We are so apt to develop a false com- 
 placency because we have not been doing 
 much harm, not so much harm as many 
 other men; we have never killed anybody, 
 we have never broken in to steal, we have 
 never committed perjury against a neigh- 
 bor. These accusations of positive and 
 criminal wrongdoing do not ruffle our se- 
 renity. "Let the galled jade wince, our 
 withers are unwrung. ' ' But have we done 
 anything at all ? That is the question. Or 
 how much have we done of all that our 
 Master put us here to do? The great bur- 
 den of the world's guilt is not made up of 
 its sins of commission; not at all; those 
 
 104 
 
FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 
 
 are bad enough, but at the worst they are 
 occasional and often accidental. But it is 
 these lifelong, uninterrupted sins of omis- 
 sion that have been heaping up that intol- 
 erable burden which only the infinite good- 
 ness of God can ever forgive. "Inasmuch 
 as ye did it not"; and that is the kind of 
 sin that presses most heavily upon our 
 hearts when we come up to our Father 
 praying, "Forgive us our debts." 
 
 But we are not to drop off the rest of 
 the petition, "as we forgive our debtors." 
 For we have no reason to expect that God 
 will forgive us unless we are forgiving, too. 
 
 The question has often been asked how 
 sin ever can be forgiven. And some, per- 
 haps, would answer that it never can be. 
 Every offense drags its penalty after it by 
 an unfailing sequence. Retribution is an 
 impregnable fact; every debt will have to 
 be paid somehow ; but evidently this prayer 
 breathes a better hope; we as Christians 
 hope that sins may be forgiven by our 
 
 105 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 Father, but how and why? and what 
 grounds can we have for any confident as- 
 surance about it? 
 
 All who have ever sat at the table of the 
 Lord would be apt to answer that our hope 
 of forgiveness is in "the blood of the new 
 covenant which is shed for the remission 
 of sins." It is because Christ once " suf- 
 fered for sins, the just for the unjust, that 
 he might bring us to God." Guilty souls 
 have been finding peace because they have 
 felt that in some way Christ, by what he 
 did and suffered, has won forgiveness for 
 us, and is able to offer it to us. All Chris- 
 tians may well be glad to remember those 
 grounds of our confidence as often as we 
 repeat the Lord's Prayer. It is because 
 Christ our Saviour has taught the prayer 
 to us that we can repeat so confidently this 
 petition for a forgiveness of our debts. 
 The prayer properly brings large beliefs 
 and hopes and assurances to us for the 
 reason that it came from the lips of him 
 
 106 
 
FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 
 
 who afterwards gave his life for us on the 
 cross. 
 
 Nevertheless the wording of the prayer 
 itself does not introduce any such reasons 
 for hoping for God's pardon. At the time 
 when our Lord was teaching his disciples 
 this prayer they did not yet know how he 
 must die on the cross. But here in the 
 plain wording of the prayer he does give 
 them another reason for hope in God's for- 
 giveness, and one that they could already 
 understand; "As we forgive our debtors, " 
 he bids them say. If we men can forgive 
 our fellow-men that is good reason for be- 
 lieving that God will be able to forgive us. 
 If I already know of forgiveness as an 
 actual fact in this world, a principle now 
 operative as between me and my debtors, 
 then all those theories of invariable retri- 
 bution will have to adjust themselves to 
 this known fact; if I can forgive, why 
 should not God? It is a most comforting 
 thought. As Calvin says, "The Lord in- 
 
 107 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 tended partly to comfort the weakness of 
 our faith ; for he has added this as a sign, 
 that we may be as certainly assured of re- 
 mission of sins being granted us by him as 
 we are certain and conscious of granting it 
 to others." And Matthew Henry says that 
 "If there be in us this gracious disposition 
 it is wrought of God," and so "encourageth 
 a hope that God will forgive us." 
 
 Yes, but suppose there is no such gra- 
 cious disposition in us; suppose that even 
 when we are approaching God in prayer 
 for forgiveness we are refusing to forgive. 
 Why, then the prayer itself becomes an im- 
 precation; we are beseeching God by our 
 prayer not to forgive us our sins, since we 
 forgive not. And as Calvin says, "What 
 do such persons gain by their prayers but 
 a heavier judgment?" 
 
 Evidently our Lord was very much in 
 earnest about this particular phrase, for it 
 is the only one that he takes up again and 
 explains further after the prayer was 
 
 108 
 
FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 
 
 ended. "For if ye forgive men their tres- 
 passes,' ' he says, "your heavenly Father 
 will forgive you : but if ye forgive not men 
 their trespasses, neither will your heavenly 
 Father forgive your trespasses." At a 
 later time he took up the same thought yet 
 once more and gave it still further treat- 
 ment in the Parable of the Unmerciful 
 Servant. That servant who had been for- 
 given by his master the hopeless debt of ten 
 thousand talents went out and found a fel- 
 low-servant who owed him a hundred 
 pence, and took him by the throat, and 
 would not listen to his cry for mercy, but 
 cast him into prison until he should pay the 
 debt. And the lord was wroth, and revoked 
 his pardon, and delivered this unmerciful 
 servant to the tormentors till he should pay 
 all that was due. 
 
 The parable shows that there are two 
 worlds in which men live ; a world of rigid 
 retribution where every debt will be ex- 
 acted to the last farthing, and another 
 
 109 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 world of mercy, forbearance, forgiveness; 
 and we men can have our choice which 
 world we shall live in, but we cannot live 
 in both. We cannot be taking forgiveness 
 from God and at the same time refusing 
 forgiveness to men. And so, as St. Chrys- 
 ostom says, "We ourselves have control 
 over the judgment that is to be passed upon 
 us. " If we can forgive and do, so will God. 
 Yes, "if we can forgive" — oh, but how 
 hard and impossible a condition that some- 
 times becomes. How can you forgive? 
 You find this petition for forgiveness re- 
 solving itself into one that God will enable 
 you to do some forgiving. Well, when you 
 get as far as the attempting of that task 
 then you find yourself walking once more 
 safely in the steps of our great Example. 
 Jesus might not ask forgiveness for him- 
 self, but where was another like him for 
 forgiving others? It was when men were 
 nailing him to the cross that he prayed, 
 "Father, forgive them, for they know not 
 no 
 
FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 
 
 what they do." We do well to seek the 
 help of that Example when we pray, "As 
 we forgive our debtors, so forgive us." 
 
 I have quoted already from the greatest 
 of American state papers, that second in- 
 augural, where the ruler of a nation was 
 making confession of the nation 's sin ; but 
 you remember that before the paper ends 
 it contains another and equally Christian 
 proclamation of forgiveness: "With malice 
 toward none, with charity for all" — the 
 world quickly learned those wonderful 
 phrases by heart — "to bind up the nation's 
 wounds ... to do all which may achieve 
 and cherish a just and lasting peace." 
 Lincoln's last legacy to his people was this 
 message of mutual forgiveness. It is a 
 message which we all wish to accept and 
 appropriate. As we ourselves hope for the 
 forgiveness of God, we must learn to do 
 our share of forgiving. This is to be a 
 daily prayer with us. It springs from a 
 need as constant as the need of daily bread. 
 111 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive 
 our debtors." "For if ye forgive men 
 their trespasses, your heavenly Father will 
 also forgive you : but if ye forgive not men 
 their trespasses, neither will your Father 
 forgive your trespasses." 
 
 113 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 Uemptation 
 
 As the Lord's Prayer draws toward its 
 close it brings us under a deep sense of 
 spiritual need. For the past the need is of 
 forgiveness, and so the prayer has asked 
 for that. As regards the future the need 
 is of deliverance, and so the prayer goes on 
 to ask for that. 
 
 ''Lead us not into temptation." Many 
 readers have been perplexed by this re- 
 quest, and perplexed for one or the other 
 of two quite different reasons. On the one 
 hand some say, "How can we suppose that 
 the good God ever would lead anyone into 
 temptation, and therefore why ask him not 
 to?" So we read in the Epistle of James, 
 "Let no man say when he is tempted, I am 
 tempted of God : for God cannot be tempted 
 with evil, neither tempteth he any man." 
 
 113 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 If God tempteth not any man why should 
 we offer a prayer that seems to imply that 
 except for the prayer, God might tempt us ! 
 It is evident that this difficulty was felt al- 
 most from the beginning, for more than one 
 of the early fathers 10 quote another read- 
 ing as sometimes given in their day, "Suf- 
 fer us not to be led into temptation." But 
 it takes little reflection to show that this 
 difficulty goes deeper than any particular 
 wording of the prayer; for it grows out 
 of the fact, everywhere observed but so im- 
 possible for us to explain, that moral evil 
 has somehow gained entrance to a world 
 under the power of a holy God; a fact 
 which we can never hope to explain, but 
 which everywhere forces itself on our at- 
 tention. Of certain things, however, we 
 can be sure; and one is that God himself 
 would never tempt a man to sin. For 
 tempting is not the same as leading into a 
 
 10 Cyprian De Dom. Orat. 25 ; Aug. De Serm. Dom. IX. 
 30. 
 
 114 
 
TEMPTATION 
 
 place where one might be tempted. The 
 latter, God might do and often does. The 
 Gospel history relates how Jesus was "led 
 up of the spirit into the wilderness to be 
 tempted of the devil." The tempting was 
 not God's doing, but the leading was. A 
 human father would not tempt his son, but 
 he might send him to college in spite of the 
 well-known fact that some new temptations 
 will assail him there that he never met at 
 home. The tempting is in no way the 
 father's act, but the sending is. "Give me 
 neither poverty nor riches," says the wise 
 man in the Proverbs, "lest I be full, and 
 deny thee ... or lest I be poor, and steal." 
 The good man recognized peculiar tempta- 
 tions coming from excessive wealth on the 
 one side and from excessive want on the 
 other; and he is wise enough to pray that 
 he himself may never be led into either 
 of those perilous extremes. But in the 
 providence of God some men have been 
 poor and other men have been rich. It is 
 
 115 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 not then a meaningless or superfluous re- 
 quest when we say, "Lead us not into temp- 
 tation. ' ' 
 
 But sometimes men have felt another 
 difficulty in offering this petition. Since it 
 is a well-known fact that the highest de- 
 velopment of spiritual character comes so 
 often through resisting temptation, how 
 could it be right for us to pray that all temp- 
 tation be abolished? James himself, the 
 very apostle who teaches us that God never 
 tempteth any man, had already declared in 
 the same chapter, "Blessed is the man that 
 endureth temptation: for when he is tried, 
 he shall receive the crown of life." And 
 Peter cries, "Beloved, think it not strange 
 concerning the fiery trial" — or temptation 
 — "that is to try you, . . . but rejoice"; and 
 elsewhere tells his readers that the trial 
 of their faith is "much more precious than 
 of gold that perisheth, though it be tried 
 with fire." So Jesus himself speaks his 
 richest promises to those disciples who have 
 116 
 
TEMPTATION 
 
 continued with him in his temptations. Al- 
 together the Scripture makes it very evi- 
 dent, as indeed we ourselves know from our 
 own observing, that this perilous experi- 
 ence of temptation sometimes offers men 
 the highest kind of spiritual opportunity. 
 It serves as the refining fire for purifying 
 the gold. Shall we not be condemning our- 
 selves to perpetual spiritual immaturity, or 
 else to hopeless spiritual mediocrity, if we 
 beg God not to lead us into temptation? 
 " Blessed is the man that endureth tempta- 
 tion." 
 
 Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time! 
 Why comes temptation but for man to meet 
 And master and make crouch beneath his feet, 
 And so be pedestaled in triumph ? Pray, 
 Lead us into no such temptations, Lord! 
 Yea, but, O thou whose servants are the bold, 
 Lead such temptations by the head and hair, 
 Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight, 
 That so he may do battle and have praise! u 
 
 And our souls thrill in response to this 
 martial aspiration of Browning's good 
 
 u Browning, The Ring and the Book. 
 117 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 pope, and we are almost on the point of 
 praying that temptation may come, that so 
 by doing battle against it we may have 
 praise, or by faithfully enduring it we may 
 have the promised blessedness. 
 
 But no ; that is not the prayer that Christ 
 has left for us to learn and offer. Rather 
 let it be our daily request that God shall 
 lead us not into temptation. Blessed is 
 the man who endures it when it comes, 
 but we are not to pray for it. "Lead us 
 not." 
 
 For any man who was himself asking for 
 the temptation or — what is much the same 
 thing — himself willfully running into temp- 
 tation, is a kind of braggart; and instead 
 of being strengthened by the experience is 
 more likely to be overthrown by it. It is 
 as if he were saying boastfully: "Try me 
 against this famous tempter of yours, and 
 see how easily I can put him to flight. You 
 tell me of others whom he has tripped up 
 and destroyed, but they are not so bold or 
 
 118 
 
TEMPTATION 
 
 so strong on their feet as I am. Try me 
 and see." 
 
 In the early days of persecution there 
 came to be a kind of frenzy among some 
 of the Christians; they would go and de- 
 liver themselves up to the authorities and 
 insist upon the honor of martyrdom, as if 
 to say, ''Put me to the test, and see how 
 boldly I shall pass through the fiery or- 
 deal." The wiser leaders of the church 
 were compelled to check this recklessness 
 by threatening heavy spiritual penalties. 
 Real martyrdom was the highest blessed- 
 ness ; but to seek it in this way made a man 
 a suicide, not a martyr. 
 
 In the gentler conditions of life ap- 
 pointed for us in these later days a man 
 may show the same vainglorious spirit in 
 some other way. He may pray God to send 
 the temptation of sorrow and loss upon 
 him, that he may show how patiently he 
 can bear it. Or being of a different temper 
 he may insist on forcing his own way into 
 
 119 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 companies and associations that have 
 proved morally disastrous to many of his 
 neighbors. When you remonstrate with 
 him, he replies easily: "No fears for me; 
 I am not a baby to need to be tied always 
 to some one's apron string. I can look out 
 for myself. If temptations come I need a 
 little exercise at resisting." 
 
 Our Master would not encourage in us 
 any such spirit of vainglory, but rather a 
 mood of humility, a sense of personal 
 danger, a prayer for deliverance from these 
 awful incitements to sin. "Watch and 
 pray, that ye enter not into temptation : the 
 spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." 
 And when our Lord offered that counsel 
 he himself had been praying, "Let this cup 
 pass from me"; for that cup had brought 
 him the cruelest temptation ever suffered 
 on earth; — "Let this cup pass from me." 
 Though he added also, "Not my will, but 
 thine, be done." 
 
 If you turn back to the earlier scene of 
 120 
 
TEMPTATION 
 
 our Lord's threefold temptation in the 
 wilderness you find that the first assault 
 was when, being hungry, he was tempted 
 to make the stones bread ; but this he would 
 not do, showing how hunger or any other 
 trial, when it comes in the way of God's 
 providence, is not to be refused; rather a 
 child of God may gain blessedness and 
 strength by bravely enduring it. 
 
 The second temptation was quite differ- 
 ent from the first. In this Jesus was 
 tempted to throw himself down from the 
 pinnacle of the temple, which he refused to 
 do; showing how the danger of falling or 
 any other trial, when it does not come in the 
 way of God's providence — when the man 
 himself had rashly and needlessly pushed 
 himself into it — will not strengthen his soul, 
 and will not bring such promise of blessed- 
 ness. No ; for a man to push himself into 
 any such peril or temptation is not trusting 
 God or serving him, but tempting him, and 
 < 'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." 
 
 121 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 So the principle is that when these temp- 
 tations come, as they often will, we are to 
 face them patiently and fearlessly; but all 
 the while our own personal desire and 
 prayer to God must be, "Lead us not into 
 them. ' ' To put it into everyday language, 
 when God sees fit to bring us into any of 
 these trials we shall do our best with his 
 help to bear them manfully ; but if it were 
 left for us to choose we prefer to stay out 
 of them. For we have not found in our- 
 selves any moral strength to spare. So, 
 conscious of weakness, our own preference 
 would be, "Lead us not into temptation"; 
 and that is the proper prayer. "Let others 
 confide as they please," says Calvin, "in 
 the native abilities and powers of free will, 
 which they suppose themselves to possess; 
 it is enough for us to stand and be strong 
 in the power of God alone." Yes, Christ 
 taught us a prayer of wise humility and 
 also of trustful courage, "Lead us not into 
 temptation, but deliver us from evil." 
 
 122 
 
TEMPTATION 
 
 And it is to be remembered that a man in 
 offering this petition does not pray for him- 
 self alone. All through the Lord's Prayer 
 we have been made conscious of our fellow- 
 ship with other worshipers. We are 
 speaking to our Father; we pray for our 
 daily bread ; we ask for the forgiveness of 
 our debts; and so here "Lead us not into 
 temptation." We are to be thinking of all 
 these other tempted souls as well as our 
 own soul — and of all other souls that ever 
 might be tempted — when we say, ' ' Lead us 
 not." 
 
 Evidently no man could offer any of 
 these petitions honestly unless he himself 
 was doing his best to bring about an an- 
 swer. When we pray, ' * Give us this day our 
 daily bread," it means that we are deeply 
 concerned for all the other hungry mem- 
 bers of the family, and are willing to do 
 what we can toward getting them all fed. 
 Simply to pray for them without the doing, 
 simply to say, " 'Depart in peace, be ye 
 
 123 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 warmed and filled ' ; notwithstanding ye give 
 them not those things which are needful to 
 the body; what doth it profit?" says the 
 practical James. So when we pray for for- 
 giveness for our debts we are thinking of all 
 the other indebted members of the family 
 who may need forgiveness as well as we, and 
 in our prayer we announce in so many 
 words our determination to do our part 
 toward furnishing such forgiveness as they 
 need. ' ' Forgive as we forgive, ' ' for we are 
 going to do our part of the forgiving. 
 
 So when we come to this awful peril of 
 temptation, our prayer is that we may not 
 be led into it. "We," it means all of us; 
 for we are thinking of ourselves and also 
 of these other imperiled souls about us, and 
 praying for them all while we pray for 
 ourselves. And, of course, that must mean 
 a willingness and strong determination on 
 our part to do whatever we ourselves can 
 toward keeping them all out of temptation 
 and delivering them all from evil. What 
 
 124 
 
TEMPTATION 
 
 an absurdity it would be — not to say blas- 
 phemy — for a man to speak this prayer to 
 God and then rise from his knees and go out 
 of the church door and willfully place in 
 some brother's way some stumbling-block or 
 occasion to fall. No, no; "it must needs 
 be that offences come ; but woe to that man 
 by whom the offence cometh ! ' ' 
 
 Temptation then is a fact in this world, 
 a fact always to be taken into our calcula- 
 tions. It would be a delusion (and a peril- 
 ous delusion) for any of us to suppose that 
 the world is soon going to be so recon- 
 structed that a man will be able to take his 
 journey through it, and march into the 
 heavenly gates, without the trouble of meet- 
 ing and overcoming temptation. No, that 
 will never be. It must needs be that of- 
 fenses come; but our own part as humble 
 and compassionate children of God is to try 
 to bring about as nearly as we can, for our- 
 selves and neighbors, that condition where 
 men shall no longer be tempted to sin. So 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 far as we have any power for arranging 
 things, we are to make it, according to 
 Gladstone's maxim, "As easy as possible 
 for men to do right, and as hard as pos- 
 sible for men to do wrong ' ' ; we are to take 
 stumbling-blocks out of the way of unsteady 
 feet, and to place all the safeguards we can 
 about those tempted souls who are likely 
 to fall. 
 
 In one sense we may never hope to suc- 
 ceed in this attempt; for whatever we do 
 the path heavenward will always remain 
 hard climbing; the broad and easy road 
 along which a man can travel without effort 
 will still be the road downward that leads 
 away from life. Temptation and difficulty 
 and peril will still do their salutary work in 
 this world; "it must needs be that offences 
 come; but woe to that man by whom the 
 offence cometh ! " "It were better for him 
 that a millstone were hanged about his neck, 
 and that he were drowned in the depth of 
 the sea,'" than that he — through his own 
 
 126 
 
TEMPTATION 
 
 greed, or malice, or selfish indifference — 
 should cause some little one to stumble. 
 This closing petition of the Lord's Prayer 
 leaves us face to face with this dark and 
 perplexing fact of moral evil and spiritual 
 peril — a fact that no one can afford to 
 treat slightingly, a fact that must often 
 send a child of God to his knees in a kind 
 of agony of prayer. 
 
 For this prayer would bring us to feel 
 that the saving of men's souls and charac- 
 ters is the one thing most to be desired; 
 and the ruin of men's souls the one thing 
 most to be dreaded ; and a thing very much 
 to be dreaded because the forces within 
 the man and round about him, working for 
 his ruin, are so terribly strong. ''For we 
 wrestle not against flesh and blood," Paul 
 cried, "but against principalities, against 
 powers, against the rulers of the darkness 
 of this world, against spiritual wickedness 
 in high places. ' ' He speaks under a sense 
 of impending danger, of perilous conflict. 
 
 127 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 And with this same sense of peril Christ 
 has brought us to our knees with what 
 sounds almost like a cry of pain and terror, 
 1 'Lead us not into temptation, but deliver 
 us from evil"; or, if you will, you may 
 read that last phrase, " Deliver us from 
 the evil one." 
 
 And so the prayer abruptly ends, as if 
 it were intended that we rise from our 
 knees with those two solemn sayings of 
 Christ still ringing in our ears, " Watch ye 
 and pray, lest ye enter into temptation," 
 and, "Whoso shall offend one of these lit- 
 tle ones, ... it were better for him that 
 a millstone were hanged about his neck, and 
 that he were drowned in the depth of the 
 sea." "Deliver us from the evil one." 
 
 There remains to consider a very beauti- 
 ful expression with which we have been 
 taught to close the Lord's Prayer, "For 
 thine is the kingdom, and the power, and 
 the glory, for ever. Amen." In Luke's re- 
 port of the prayer these words do not occur, 
 
 128 
 
TEMPTATION 
 
 and if you turn to the Revised Version you 
 find that they are absent from Matthew's 
 report also. The oldest manuscripts do not 
 contain them in either Gospel, but indicate 
 that the prayer, as Christ taught it, ended 
 with the words, ' ' Deliver us from evil. ' ' 
 
 This additional sentence seems to have 
 been at first the response made by the con- 
 gregation when the prayer ended. A little 
 later it was written into some of the 
 copies of the Gospel itself. They form a 
 beautiful and fitting response, and as such 
 we do well to continue to use them, for they 
 help us to remember, or else show that we 
 have not forgotten, those large requests 
 with which the whole prayer began; that 
 God's name should be hallowed, that his 
 kingdom should come, that his will should 
 be done, on earth as in heaven. It was so 
 that Christ taught us to pray first of all. 
 And now at the end we are glad to return 
 from the sense of our own human weakness 
 and peril, and from the whole dark mystery 
 
 129 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 of temptation and spiritual ruin; lifting 
 our thoughts once more to God and his per- 
 fect goodness, and the certain triumph of 
 his cause. The end of true prayer is al- 
 ways a confident hope in God. "Look up," 
 cried the Lord to his disciples, "and lift 
 up your heads; for your redemption 
 draweth nigh. ' ' 
 
 What though thou rulest not, 
 Yet heaven and earth and hell 
 
 Proclaim, God sitteth on the throne 
 And ruleth all things well. 
 
 "Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent 
 reigneth. " " For thine is the kingdom, and 
 the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen. ' ' 
 
 130 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 Hn Ibis IRame 
 
 We have been studying the petitions of 
 the Lord's Prayer; a brief prayer, but, 
 brief as it is, we have found that it holds 
 a world of meaning. One thing, however, 
 the prayer does not hold, one word that has 
 grown specially dear and familiar to us in 
 our Christian worship, and that is the 
 name of our Lord himself. A prayer with- 
 out that name seems to us hardly Chris- 
 tian. Turn to the manual of worship 
 that has been most widely accepted by 
 English-speaking Christians — the Book 
 of Common Prayer — and look at the 
 order appointed for the morning, and 
 you will see that all the other prayers 
 in it, with a single exception, close 
 with some such phrase as "Through 
 Jesus Christ, our Lord," or "This we 
 
 131 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 beg for Jesus Christ's sake," the natural 
 conclusion for Christian prayer. 
 
 Through him the first fond prayers are said, 
 
 Our lips of childhood frame; 
 The last low whispers of our dead 
 
 Are burdened with his name. 
 
 But in the prayer which Jesus himself has 
 taught us that name does not occur. It 
 may seem a strange omission, but a later 
 saying of Christ himself furnishes explana- 
 tion of it. "Hitherto," he said, and this 
 was at the end of his life, the evening be- 
 fore he suffered, ' ' ye have asked nothing in 
 my name." And why should they ask in 
 his name while he was still there with them, 
 still by his own presence controlling and 
 indorsing their requests of the Father? It 
 was after he had been taken away from 
 them that these men would long to know 
 that their requests still went up with that 
 same indorsement as if he were with them, 
 that they still carried the power of his 
 name; and so he here gives them this au- 
 thority. 
 
 132 
 
IN HIS NAME 
 
 But even in those earlier days while the 
 Lord Jesus was with his disciples, they had 
 been learning in other ways, if not in their 
 prayer, that his name had great power. To 
 receive even a little child "in his name" 
 had large promise of reward. It was in the 
 power of that "name" that they under- 
 took all their strange works of healing. 
 They came back one day saying to him, 
 "Lord, even the devils are subject unto us 
 through thy name. ' ' Indeed the fact of this 
 mysterious power residing in the "name" 
 became so evident that even some who were 
 not true disciples at all would try to avail 
 themselves of it; some to whom Christ 
 would have to say at the last, "I never 
 knew you"; but they would be saying to 
 him, "Have we not prophesied in thy 
 name? and in thy name have cast out 
 devils? and in thy name done many won- 
 derful works!" They had used his name. 
 Even while Jesus was yet with his disciples 
 they were coming to feel that it gave new 
 
 133 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 significance to any word that they might 
 speak, or any deed that they might perform, 
 to say that it was "in his name." 
 
 So it is not to be wondered at that after 
 their Lord was taken from their sight these 
 same men still cherished the phrase which 
 already meant so much to them, and that 
 they still made frequent trial of its power, 
 confiding in it more and more as they found 
 how much this name of Jesus would do for 
 them. 
 
 We may recall that first great scene of 
 apostolic activity after the Day of Pente- 
 cost, the event which first brought the new 
 church to the attention of the rulers as a 
 formidable power which would have to be 
 reckoned with; it was the healing of the 
 impotent man by the Beautiful Gate of the 
 temple. Afterwards when Peter was called 
 to answer for this act before the rulers, he 
 said, "Be it known unto you that by the 
 name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth doth this 
 man stand here before you whole." And 
 
 134 
 
IN HIS NAME 
 
 that was just what Peter had said to the 
 lame man himself when he took him by the 
 hand, "In the name of Jesus Christ of 
 Nazareth, rise up and walk. ' ' Already they 
 had found a power in this name which as- 
 sured their own confidence as disciples, and 
 which also aroused the apprehension of 
 their adversaries; for the express com- 
 mand which the rulers laid upon these men 
 was that they should not teach "in this 
 name." 
 
 So as one reads on through The Acts and 
 the Epistles the evidence appears on almost 
 every page how the name of Jesus Christ 
 was coming to be magnified among those 
 men. They rejoiced when they were 
 "counted worthy to suffer shame for his 
 name ' ' ; they were happy if they were ' ' re- 
 proached for the name." Their assemblies 
 were gathered "in his name"; they spoke 
 of it as the "name which is above every 
 name"; the name at which "every knee 
 should bow"; the one "name under heaven 
 
 135 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 given among men, whereby we must be 
 saved. ' ' So every one of them that named 
 that name of Christ was to "depart from 
 iniquity" ; in that name they were baptized ; 
 in that name they were justified. Their 
 brightest hope for the world to come was 
 that they should then see his face and "his 
 name shall be in their foreheads." In 
 short, as Paul sums it all up in his letter to 
 the Colossians, * ' Whatsoever ye do in word 
 or deed, do all in the name of the Lord 
 Jesus. ' 
 
 Now if the name of Christ played so 
 large a part in all the thought and speech 
 and action of these disciples, you do not 
 wonder that it also claimed a very large 
 place in their prayer. If they had learned 
 to find some strange power in that name, 
 even when they were dealing with their 
 fellow-men, surely they would not cease to 
 trust in it when they came to deal with God. 
 And so it was in that comprehensive pas- 
 sage which I have just quoted from the 
 
 136 
 
IN HIS NAME 
 
 Colossians, Paul ends the sentence by say- 
 ing, ''Do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, 
 giving thanks to God and the Father by 
 him." And in similar terms he writes to 
 the Ephesians, "Giving thanks always for 
 all things unto God and the Father in the 
 name of our Lord Jesus Christ." I quote 
 these familiar passages — a very few of the 
 many that might be quoted — to show how, 
 after our Lord's death, his disciples had 
 grown into the habit of carrying his name 
 with them wherever they went, and attach- 
 ing it to all the interests of their lives; to 
 their words of confession, their works of 
 help and healing, their patient suffering of 
 wrong — all was in the name of the Lord 
 Jesus. 
 
 But especially to their prayers ; for what 
 Jesus on the night before his passion told 
 them they had not done heretofore, here- 
 after they would be always doing, always 
 asking good things of the Father in his 
 name. Indeed the Lord's Prayer itself, 
 
 137 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 though it does not speak the name of Jesus, 
 would now carry in their own thought — as 
 it still does for us all — the sense of his 
 presence. It was he who taught it to them. 
 It was by reason of his encouragement that 
 they were bold to call God their Father; 
 it was by reason of his indorsement that 
 the guiltiest of them could come boldly ask- 
 ing forgiveness for their sins. So in all 
 their praying — from that day to this — it 
 has been characteristic of all prayer which 
 would be known as Christian that it has 
 been offered in the name of Jesus Christ. 
 So this thing that Jesus told the disciples 
 they had not done up to the time when he 
 left them, since that time they have never 
 ceased doing, asking all sorts of good 
 things from the Father in his name. 
 
 But now it is time to raise the question 
 what it means to say that a man is doing 
 deeds, or speaking words, or offering pray- 
 ers in the name of Jesus Christ. Certainly 
 it ought to mean something more than a 
 
 138 
 
IN HIS NAME 
 
 mere repeating of this form of words. 
 Those evil-doers whom Christ said he did 
 not know could claim that they had used 
 that form of words, and repeated it over 
 and over again: "In his name prophesy- 
 ing, and in his name casting out devils, and 
 in his name doing many wonderful works ' ' ; 
 but that brought them no nearer to him. 
 A form of words that is nothing more than 
 a form, a magical incantation, has no place 
 in Christian worship ; and the more sacred 
 the words the worse it would be to use them 
 as a form, and nothing more. 
 
 Well then, back of the outward form, 
 what does it mean when we offer our 
 prayers to God in the name of Jesus I What 
 has it meant from the beginning ? 
 
 For one thing it has meant, in the faith of 
 Christians generally, a new confidence that 
 God will answer the prayer. Many a 
 simple-minded believer could express his 
 own meaning in some such way as this, "I 
 myself am not worthy that God should 
 
 139 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 listen to me for my own sake ; but when I 
 speak in the name of his dear Son, who 
 loved me and gave himself for me, then I 
 am sure that God will listen." So the 
 phrase, "In the name of Jesus," would 
 mean nearly what we mean by that other 
 common phrase, "For Jesus' sake." It 
 means a new confidence that God will hear 
 the prayer. Surely we have a right to such 
 confidence. Surely Christ himself implied 
 as much when in teaching his disciples this 
 new form for their petitions he added, 
 "Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy 
 may be full." He intended to give a new 
 confidence. 
 
 Only we must never suppose that God 
 our heavenly Father needed any such per- 
 suasion to interest him in us ; we must not 
 think so unworthily of God. Good old 
 Matthew Henry urges this caution in his 
 comment on this text: "When we are 
 taught in prayer," he says, "to plead 
 Christ's merit and intercession, it is not 
 
 140 
 
IN HIS NAME 
 
 as if all the kindness were in Christ only, 
 and in God nothing but wrath and fury. 
 No, . . . the Father's love and good will 
 appointed Christ to be the mediator. . . . 
 So let it confirm in us good thoughts of 
 God." 
 
 And while I am quoting from that 
 worthy commentator, listen to one other 
 word: " 'Hitherto have ye asked nothing 
 in my name.' Nothing, comparatively, 
 nothing to what ye might have asked. . . . 
 See what a generous benefactor our Lord 
 Jesus is; he gives liberally, and is so far 
 from upbraiding us with the frequency and 
 largeness of his gifts that he rather up- 
 braids us with the seldomness and strait- 
 ness of our requests. You have asked noth- 
 ing in comparison of what you want, and 
 what I have to give." Yes, that is true, 
 too; the words mean that, and so every 
 time we offer any prayer in Christ's name, 
 and thereby are made to think once more of 
 the great reach of his good will toward us 
 
 141 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 and toward our neighbors, it ought always 
 to affect us with a deeper sense of the piti- 
 ful smallness of our own desires. It is as 
 if once more we could hear him saying, as he 
 said to the Twelve : i ' Is that all ? You have 
 asked nothing yet — nothing to what I stand 
 ready to give. Go on with your asking, ask 
 more." Certainly as often as we pray in 
 Christ's name it ought to encourage us to 
 the asking for larger things from God. 
 The new phrase means that. 
 
 But more than tliis, when we speak in 
 Christ's name (whether to God or to men), 
 it means that we, if we are Christians, 
 stand here now as the visible representa- 
 tives of his earthly mission. The interests 
 that he lived and died for on earth he has 
 now, humanly speaking, left in our charge. 
 We have been constituted a sort of exec- 
 utors to the estate. And in discharging 
 this sacred trust we necessarily speak 
 and act for him. As well as we know how 
 we ought to be always carrying out his 
 
 142 
 
IN HIS NAME 
 
 purpose, thus doing whatever we do in 
 his name. 
 
 Of course to our own thought the rela- 
 tion is not quite that of an executor to a 
 dead man's estate, for we know that our 
 Lord is not dead; though our eyes cannot 
 presently see him, he is still alive to us. 
 But he is not present to the senses of men ; 
 and in his apparent absence we have to act 
 for him by some power of attorney, as it 
 were. In this deep and vital sense we must 
 be doing whatever we do in his name ; do- 
 ing for him and in his apparent absence 
 what we believe he would do for himself if 
 he were visibly here. 
 
 This should be true of all our work as 
 Christians, and anyone can see how it ap- 
 plies also to our prayer as Christians. 
 When, by the authority vested in us, we pray 
 in his name — that is, when we sign his name 
 to our request — it is in the assurance that 
 this is what he himself would be asking for 
 if he were here. Otherwise we should be 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 violating the trust imposed in us. If, know- 
 ingly, you sign Christ's name to some docu- 
 ment that he if present would have refused 
 to sign, you are guilty of a kind of spiritual 
 forgery, and that must never be. If ever 
 you feel compelled to ask God for things 
 that you think Christ would not have been 
 willing to ask for, then as an honest man 
 offer that prayer in your own name, not in 
 his. 
 
 So this new formula of Christian prayer, 
 while it encourages us to ask for larger 
 things, and with stronger confidence, also 
 imposes upon us a new sense of responsi- 
 bility; we must deal with him honestly in 
 the use of his name. 
 
 " Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my 
 name : ask, and ye shall receive. ' ' One can 
 feel a tone of pleading urgency in these 
 words of Christ spoken to these dearest 
 friends of his. For this was his last inter- 
 view with them before his passion. He 
 spoke as a man will speak to those whom 
 
 144 
 
IN HIS NAME 
 
 he loves best, and when he is looking into 
 their faces for the last time. I mean for the 
 last time in this present earthly life; of 
 course, we may still hope for later meetings 
 on the other side ; but have you ever found 
 that hope of a future reunion to diminish 
 much the pathos of your last meeting with 
 some friend here and now? It was under 
 this deep emotion, looking as for the last 
 time into these faces that had grown dear 
 to him, that Jesus said some things to them 
 that he had never said before. For one 
 thing he told them that as often as they 
 gathered about the table in friendly com- 
 pany to eat together after he was gone, they 
 must be sure to remember him. And that 
 is a request which still moves the heart of 
 every lover of Jesus Christ. The church 
 universal still reads those words into 
 the most solemn act of her worship; we 
 still carve the words in the most sacred 
 part of our house of prayer, "This do 
 in remembrance of me." And it is a re- 
 
 145 
 
THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 quest that no friend of Jesus would like 
 to disregard. 
 
 But then again at this same last inter- 
 view Jesus made known to these same 
 friends of his his desire that hereafter they 
 should do their praying to God in his name. 
 Apparently our Lord was earnestly desir- 
 ous that his friends should treat his name 
 as if it still carried great weight with God 
 and with men. 
 
 One can understand that feeling. Some 
 friend of yours is going to some distant 
 country where he is a stranger, but you 
 yourself have been well known; and you 
 give him letters of introduction to those in 
 that country whose acquaintance would be 
 of most value to him. "They will do the 
 right thing for anyone who comes in my 
 name," you say. It would grieve you a lit- 
 tle if your friend should decline to use the 
 tetters, seeming to disdain your introduc- 
 tion, as if he had not thought your name 
 worth using. So here almost the last word 
 
 146 
 
IN HIS NAME 
 
 Jesus spoke to his friends was this gener- 
 ous message of introduction and indorse- 
 ment. "Wherever you go," he said, "and 
 whatever you need, you can use my name. ' ' 
 These men did not disdain the offer of 
 introduction, but from that time forward 
 they considered that name of Jesus their 
 one most precious asset. You can find the 
 proofs of the value they put upon it all 
 through the later books of the New Testa- 
 ment. We have quoted a very few of the 
 passages which indicate how these early 
 disciples, both in their words to God and in 
 their dealings with men, were eager to do 
 all things in the name of the Lord Jesus. 
 The question occurs whether we ourselves 
 have always shown the same eagerness, 
 whether our Lord has ever been grieved 
 at any of us because, after he had made 
 us this same offer of his name we have 
 slighted the offer. "Use my name," he 
 said, "tell everyone that you come from 
 me." But we shook our heads and set our 
 
 147 
 
73, 
 
 THE LORD'S PRAYER 
 
 lips. If so the fault ought not to be re- 
 peated. "Hitherto have ye asked nothing 
 in my name : ask, and ye shall receive, that 
 your joy may be full." 
 
 This parting message may well stand at 
 the close of our study of our Lord's in- 
 structions on the subject of prayer. "Lord, 
 teach us to pray," said the disciple; and 
 we have been following his answer to that 
 request. We have found it in that personal 
 example which he was always setting them 
 by his own praying; we have traced it also 
 through the successive sentences of that 
 sacred form of words which he has left to 
 guide us in our supplications. But the in- 
 struction is not completed till we reach this 
 parting message from the Master to his dis- 
 ciples : i ' Hitherto have ye asked nothing in 
 my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that 
 your joy may be full." 
 
 148 
 
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