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THY KINGDOM COME: 
 
 Cm Sermons 
 
 ON THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 PREACHED IN KING'S CHAPEL, BOSTON, 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY WILDER FOOTE. 
 
 
 NOV 4 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 1891. 
 

 Copyright, 1891, 
 By Roberts Brothers. 
 
 The Lim**«y 
 
 OF CoNf,kUa% 
 
 SSmtrersttg 19ress: 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U. S. A. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 'T^HESE Sermons were prepared for the Sun- 
 -** day morning services at King's Chapel 
 with no thought of publication, and lack the 
 careful revision which Mr. Foote always deemed 
 necessary before printing. 
 
 Preached after a time of deep experience in 
 his own life, they spoke to those who heard 
 them of the spiritual realities in which he him- 
 self had been living; and it is hoped that 
 any who, in quietness, seek to enter into near 
 companionship with this little book, will find 
 in it a like help and blessing. 
 
 F. E. F. 
 
 Boston, October, 1891. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMON PAGE 
 
 I. Lord, Teach us to Pray 9 
 
 II. Our Father Which Art in Heaven . 35 
 
 III. Hallowed be Thy Name 57 
 
 IY. Thy Kingdom Come 79 
 
 V. Thy Will be Done 101 
 
 VI. Our Daily Bread 127 
 
 VII. I. Forgiveness. — The Divine Side . 139 
 
 VIII. II. Forgiveness. — The Human Side . 159 
 
 IX. Lead Us not into Temptation . . . 185 
 
 X. But Deliver Us from Evil .... 209 
 
LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY. 
 
"LORD, TEACH US TO PKAY." 
 
 And it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a 
 certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said 
 unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught 
 his disciples, — Luke xi. 1. 
 
 npHUS Saint Luke leads us into our Lord's 
 *- Prayer. The Gospel according to Saint 
 Matthew, you will remember, gives us the same 
 great words of prayer as a part of the Sermon 
 on the Mount. " But thou, when thou prayest, 
 enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut 
 thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret. 
 . . . When ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as 
 the heathen do . . . for your Father knoweth 
 what things ye have need of, before ye ask 
 him. After this manner therefore pray ye;" 
 and then follows the prayer which, the more 
 one studies its infinite depth of meaning, we 
 see more and more to be at once the simplest 
 and the most profound form of human words. 
 
10 "Lord, Teach us to Pray." 
 
 It is very natural that we should find this 
 prayer of our Lord spoken by him not only in 
 that Sermon on the Mount, which is, in a man- 
 ner, the condensing of his gospel into one shin- 
 ing focus, but when his disciples want to be 
 taught, as in our text. Doubtless before he led 
 others into the paths of its supplications, which 
 have since been trodden, like the aisles of ancient 
 cathedrals, by uncounted prayerful feet, but which 
 then were new and strange ways, unfrequented 
 even by those who really sought to pray, — he 
 first travelled them himself. They asked him 
 to teach them as they saw the light in his face 
 as he turned from his own prayers back to the 
 common world in which they were ; and they 
 wanted to catch the glow of that divine fire, — 
 to learn the secret of that communion. The 
 strongest enforcement of his teaching about 
 prayer is in the fact that he has himself tried it 
 and knows whereof he speaks. 
 
 What else, indeed, is the life of Jesus Christ, 
 if it be not, supremely, the visible expression of 
 the duty which calls us to prayer, the renewal 
 which is in prayer, the answer which is bestowed 
 
"Lord, Teach us to Pray" 11 
 
 upon prayer? Whether it be in the consecra- 
 tion of the deep moments in his ministry when, 
 at each point of crisis, he withdrew into the 
 mountain alone and passed the night alone in 
 prayer to his Father, or when he girded his 
 spirit anew for great works of healing or mercy 
 by lifting it from the heaven in which it al- 
 ways was to the heaven above it, or when he 
 met the supreme hour in his life-work by 
 bending in Gethsemane to take the cup whose 
 bitter portion his Father gave him to drink of, 
 — in all, his divinest moments manifest them- 
 selves to us through this act of prayer, as it 
 were a window. The moments when he seems 
 to come closest to us, yet seems most above 
 us, are those when his soul blends in light 
 and love with his Father's spirit, and we say, 
 " Behold ! he prayeth ! " 
 
 So, then, that question asked by the disciples 
 as by children coming to a wiser friend and 
 helper, "Lord, teach us to pray," is brought 
 home to us in the most affecting way by the 
 persuasion of our Lord's example upon our lov- 
 ing obedience, and in the most convincing way 
 
12 "Lord , Teach us to Pray" 
 
 by the clear shining in him of the truth of that 
 spiritual law which lies at the heart of his re- 
 ligion, — that prayer is the living way open be- 
 tween our human spirits and the Divine Spirit. 
 
 I want to ask you to try with me, in some of 
 our Sunday mornings together, to enter really 
 into the heart of the meaning of this mighty 
 prayer of our Christian faith as we only can do 
 by pondering it deeply, sentence by sentence. 
 I said it was at once the simplest and the most 
 profound form of human words. Yet the fact 
 that all of us have learned to say it, that the 
 youngest child is not thought too young to be 
 taught it, that every word in it is a simple 
 word, may easily hide from us the infinite depth 
 and height that is in it. Each sentence in it is 
 transparently clear as the purest water — even 
 the water of life ; and as the clearness of a stream 
 hides its depth, so I think we may easily fancy 
 that we can sound this which is far beyond the 
 reach of any merely earthly plummet. It would 
 be possible for a person to imagine that he had 
 got beyond the use of anything so familiar, 
 so commonplace, as the Lord's Prayer, who 
 
"Lord, Teach us to Pray" 13 
 
 never had really learned to say it at all. And 
 the Lord's Prayer is not only infinitely deeper 
 than the shallowness of any merely superficial 
 thoughts about it, it is also far larger than 
 to be only the expression of the gentle, plead- 
 ing side of the character of Christ, — the breath- 
 ing of the religious sentiment of Christianity. 
 As a drop of water contains forces which, set 
 loose, are akin to the thunderbolt and the earth- 
 quake, so the secrets of uttermost human need, 
 of in tensest human passion, and of the powers of 
 Divine omnipotence, are all locked up in this 
 mighty prayer wdiich we have from our Master, 
 Christ, — which we have from him because it 
 was first in his own heart, with all its depths 
 and heights and powers. If only we can be 
 empowered to unlock these divine forces of 
 strength and peace so as to bring them to bear 
 prevailingly on our own spirits, filling them 
 with the spirit of Jesus Christ ! 
 
 " As he was praying in a certain place, when 
 he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, 
 Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his 
 disciples. ,, 
 
14 "Lord, Teach us to Pray?' 
 
 Yet at the very beginning the disciple is met 
 by questions which strike at the root of the very 
 idea of prayer itself. To pray is so natural an 
 expression of human need and human aspiration 
 that there is no record of any people among 
 whom there has not been some method of ad- 
 dressing the unseen powers which they have 
 worshipped, with appeals for succor or thanks for 
 safety. Or if any contrary record has been found, 
 the exception is only sufficient to prove the rule. 
 To believe in the effect of such supplication be- 
 longs to the simple conditions of society which 
 are its truest conditions ; and only the artificial 
 conditions which result from a highly complex 
 social order give birth to doubt and disbelief 
 of the reality of this vital relation between the 
 spirit of man and the Divine Spirit. But these 
 artificial conditions are exactly those of the world 
 in which we are to-day ; and since the questions 
 which touch this vital matter live and breathe in 
 the atmosphere which is our breath of life, we 
 cannot help meeting them. They lie across the 
 very threshold of our thoughts of prayer. At the 
 threshold, then, we must pause to confront them 
 
"Lord, Teach us to Pray" 15 
 
 for a moment, before we enter the Holy Place 
 where there surely await us strength and peace. 
 The first " lion in the way " that meets us is 
 the modern conception of law, eternal, universal, 
 as leaving no place in the universe for prayer 
 in the proper sense of the word. Not that the 
 hard and inflexible sides of life are more grim 
 and fatalistic in their bearing now than they 
 were in the day when Jesus opened a living 
 fountain of prayer for men. The cold of winter 
 w 7 as as terrible on the snowy heights of Leba- 
 non as to-day in the Arctic wave which engulfs 
 a shuddering continent. The scorching heat of 
 the Jordan Valley smote the disciples of John 
 with pitiless fervor, even while he taught them. 
 The same stars looked down with steely gleam 
 from their fathomless spaces. The cruelties and 
 hardnesses of human life were less softened by 
 pity, — seemed more ruled by an iron fate than 
 now. " John taught his disciples " to pray, and 
 they prayed even in a world where the savage 
 daughter of Herodias was suffered to dance his 
 head off from his body ; and the disciples of 
 Jesus prayed in a world which was suffered to 
 
16 "Lord, Teach us to Pray" 
 
 nail the holy one upon the cross, and by their 
 prayer changed the face of that cruel, godless 
 world. Yet I would not make light of the fact 
 that the modern conceptions of the vast uni- 
 versal order do re-enforce the difficulties with 
 which (God knoweth) life as it is, in its hard- 
 nesses and its pains, bears heavily upon our 
 spirits. 
 
 The researches of physical science bring out 
 in grander and grander outline, whichever 
 way we look, the sublime idea of an Order 
 immense beyond our power to measure, fixed 
 beyond our power to change. Shining among 
 the farthest specks of light, which are really 
 worlds, keeping their appointed watch in their 
 eternal orbits ; written on every atom as it con- 
 forms to immutable laws of combination and 
 proportion ; beneath all the grand phenomena 
 of the natural world, are deciphered indications 
 of the Divine method of governing the uni- 
 verse. They give us a far juster and higher 
 conception of it, a far clearer intellectual pic- 
 ture than former generations had. They seem 
 to lift us above the thin film of atmosphere 
 
"Lord, Teach us to PrayP 17 
 
 which wraps about our tiny earth-ball with 
 a warm, hazy mantle, into the higher ether. 
 But how cold and thin an air is that for faith 
 to breathe ! 
 
 But is it legitimate to infer from all this that 
 God has so placed this huge framework of ma- 
 terial laws "between himself and his children, as 
 a great gulf across which no human voice can 
 cry so loud as to obtain an answer? Is the 
 universe so subject to material laws that prayer 
 can never avail within this vast environment? 
 And shall we go the one step beyond this, and 
 hold that spiritual things also follow an unvary- 
 ing and an invariable order ? 
 
 Doubtless, yes, so far as this, — that nothing 
 can happen contrary to the eternal purposes of 
 God, which purposes reveal themselves to us in 
 law. But the mistake, it seems to me, of those 
 who lay such emphasis — often with a truly re- 
 ligious spirit — upon the omnipotence of law, 
 lies in divorcing it from the thought of the liv- 
 ing God. We do not spell the word rightly in 
 our minds if we let ourselves forget that law, 
 mighty though it be, is only the constant ex- 
 
 2 
 
18 "Lord, Teach us to Pray." 
 
 pression of the will of One, a veritable Person, 
 who is mightier. The hope of philosophers is 
 that beneath all the laws of the physical uni- 
 verse they shall one day discover a higher law 
 uniting them all. Is it not contrary to right 
 reason to believe that such a higher law, while 
 comprehending in its grasp all the other facts 
 of the universe, would exclude the great fact of 
 - prayer ? You believe that God is a Being, per- 
 sonal in the most vital sense of the word, who 
 has ordered all the laws of the universe in the 
 highest wisdom; how can you help believing 
 that the instinct and impulse which moves the 
 heart in the most intense moments of our life 
 to flutter up toward Him in petition, — nay, 
 rather, to rise by a natural gravitation to Him 
 as its source, as "fire ascending seeks the sun," 
 — how, I say, can you help believing that this 
 divine instinct has a place in the great system 
 of his providential order? He has so ordered 
 his world, you say, that certain events shall 
 follow in regular sequence. But what prevents 
 you from believing that prayer shall be one 
 event in that sequence; and, if so, that the 
 
"Lord, Teach us to Pray" 19 
 
 final issue shall be shaped in part by that 
 prayer ? I believe that the true science will 
 more and more come to accept this large view, 
 and so will more and more come into accord 
 with the simple heart of faith. For faith is 
 surely right in feeling that if the voice of prayer 
 were hopelessly silenced, the Father, loving and 
 pitiful, revealed to us in the Gospel of Christ, 
 would be gone from us; and not only so, but 
 every personal attribute which we ascribe to 
 Him would be dissolved away from the inscru- 
 table mystery in which the thought of God 
 would elude our most anxious quest. 
 
 Do I, then, mean to say that our prayers must 
 be answered according to their request ? By no 
 means necessarily so. It may comport better 
 with the will of God that they should be an- 
 swered quite otherwise. I see not, indeed, how 
 those who know the history of such human 
 lives as have been lived in this world a thou- 
 sand and a thousand times, can doubt that men 
 have received such answers as could not be ex- 
 plained except by the presence of the inter- 
 vening God. I think there must be many of 
 
20 "Lord, Teach us to PrayT 
 
 us here to-day who are not ignorant what it 
 is, at times of deep religious experience, to 
 feel thrilled and awed by a sense that when 
 the soul opened itself willingly to the Di- 
 vine -influence a guidance was felt, a grace 
 was given, which we could only understand 
 when we saw that the human spirit ascending 
 was met by the Divine Spirit descending in 
 answer. 
 
 But " the first condition of prayer is, that it 
 shall be really offered to God, — that is, to the 
 highest and purest will of which he who prays 
 has any conception. It must mean desire not 
 to overrule, but to be overruled by Him." A 
 selfish wish, even if thrown out in that form, 
 is still selfishness praying to itself. He who 
 gave us the Lord's Prayer, with its trustful 
 voicing of our great human needs, has shown 
 us the spirit which should underlie all our 
 prayer, when in his own hour of trial he 
 cried, " Nevertheless, Father, not as I will, 
 but as thou wilt ! " 
 
 " In Christ's sense, Christian prayer addresses 
 primarily not God's omnipotence at all, but his 
 
" Lord) Teach us to PrayP 21 
 
 spiritual nature. . . . Prayer is . . . the chief 
 method by which the eager and short-sighted 
 and imperfect mind gradually learns to purify 
 itself in the flame of Divine love. People talk 
 and think as if prayer only meant bringing pres- 
 sure to hear for private purposes on the Power 
 which touches the secret springs of life. But 
 in Christ's teaching it means bringing Divine 
 influences to bear on these private purposes, 
 so as to extinguish or transform them." 
 
 Do I, then, mean to say that it is only fitting 
 for us to ask for spiritual gifts or blessings ? 
 This thought is, it seems to me, another " lion 
 in the way/' which prevents many a soul from 
 finding in prayer the comfort and help they 
 might naturally hope for. That which seems, 
 at first sight, a peculiarly spiritual view of the 
 whole subject, hinders instead of helping the 
 spiritual benefit. 
 
 It mingles (do you say ?) an element of self- 
 ishness in that communion with the Unseen 
 which should be absolutely pure and unselfish, 
 if we mix with it the thought of any tem- 
 poral advantage we may be desiring. This 
 
22 "Lord, Teach us to Pray:' 
 
 has a specious sound, but is it so in fact ? 
 Again we turn to the great prayer of our Lord 
 for light ; and we certainly find that it touches 
 the great needs of the life where we are. It 
 speaks as the voice of human need uttering 
 itself to Him who is able to answer our need. 
 Now, manifestly, we do not need only spiritual 
 benefits. No day can pass without your feel- 
 ing aware that you want some earthly blessing, 
 all the way from the gain of some prosperity 
 which would give new ease to mind and heart, 
 to the enriching in love or friendship which 
 is so fine a treasure added to your nature that 
 you can hardly separate it in your thought 
 from purely spiritual gifts. If you ought not 
 to pray for these things you must leave all 
 such thoughts pertaining to our common life 
 outside the door of the closet where we pray. 
 But what an inference is this ! It is simply 
 saying that the larger part of our life is out- 
 side the sphere which we expect God to touch. 
 How can it otherwise than follow that we shall 
 come to regard the interests and occupations 
 which fill so much of our waking thoughts as 
 
"Lord, Teach us to Pray." 23 
 
 beyond the region of his care, — lying entirely 
 in the earth's shadow ? In other words, we 
 shall remove the chief obstacle which prevents 
 our selfishness from becoming entirely selfish, 
 — the most spiritual element which we can 
 mingle with our desires to purge away their 
 earthiness and their worldliness. Do you find, 
 as a fact, that you are more spiritual-minded 
 when you practise on this theory than when 
 you bring prayer into the circle of your daily 
 life ? Are not your requests for spiritual 
 blessings apt to become faint and far between 
 if you painfully winnow out from them every 
 hint of the most real wants which confront 
 you every hour and engross time and mind 
 and heart ? 
 
 In this age of the world, when the chimneys 
 of your factories blur the sky with their smoke, 
 when the noise of your business drowns the si- 
 lence till you cannot hear yourself think, there 
 must be slight danger of bringing the thought 
 of God too close to the sphere of practical 
 life. 
 
 And the Christian conception of God — which 
 
24 "Lord, Teach us to Pray" 
 
 is the only conception in which our intellect and 
 our heart can find reconciliation — will not let 
 us hold any other idea but this. 
 
 "Though the highest prayers are prayers for 
 the fulfilment of God's will, whatever it be, . . . 
 there is so much spiritual education in the habit 
 of intimate communion with God, — that is, of 
 constantly bringing our human desires into a 
 presence in which nothing merely selfish can 
 long remain, — that we are induced to pour out 
 our hearts even to their most childish wishes 
 before Him, by the assurance that it is often His 
 will to give what we ask because we ask it, even 
 where it would not have been God's purpose to 
 give it if we had not asked it. Is there any 
 inconsistency between the belief that there are 
 some human prayers which God grants in order 
 to draw closer the tie between Him and man, and 
 the belief that the true object of prayer is to lift 
 man up to God, to subdue the human will to the 
 Divine ? . . . No ! because the Christian teach- 
 ing impresses on us, not that man is to be ex- 
 tinguished in God, but that he must be utterly 
 willing and desirous to surrender himself to God. 
 
"Lord) Teach us to Pray? 25 
 
 Hence he is to have a self to surrender, — a per- 
 manent self to mould into the Divine image, 
 but never to lose." 
 
 The highest view of life is the truest. Only 
 when we regard it as God's gift to us, and its 
 privileges as ways of serving Him, do we know 
 how to use them aright. Whatever life gives 
 us, then, of good, comes from God. Whatever 
 good we desire will be given us by Him, if 
 indeed we obtain it. This being so, how can 
 we but ask Him for what we want ? The house 
 whose walls you are rearing, the business enter- 
 prise which fills your thoughts, the welfare of 
 the friend, the child, who is dearer than life 
 to you, — shall we not tell Him that we de- 
 pend upon His favor for these ? But, you say, 
 it is not seemly to ask for what He already 
 knows our wish for ; He will give it, if it is best 
 for us, without our asking. Why, the point 
 is, that you are asking it already by trying 
 to get it, — knocking persistently at a door of 
 gain, which you are trying with all your human 
 might to open. Will you not ask in a higher 
 wa y> by lifting up the object of your desire into 
 
26 "Lord, Teach us to Pray." 
 
 the purer atmosphere of spiritual communion, 
 — baptizing your wish into conscious prayer ? 
 
 Nor have we a right, either, to think that 
 our request has no effect upon the mind of 
 God. 
 
 There is nothing contrary to a true philos- 
 ophy, as I have said, in holding that prayer 
 is a part of His law, fully understood. That 
 He is a Person implies that He will hear his 
 child. It may be that He will answer accord- 
 ing to the letter of the prayer; it may be that 
 He will not so answer. But if you have prayed 
 in the right spirit of submission and love and 
 trust, or even with a great yearning of your 
 struggling heart to win such a spirit, it is cer- 
 tain — it must be a law of the Divine nature 
 itself — that He will answer in ways according 
 to your true necessity, and that He will answer 
 because you pray, " Ask, " said Christ, " and ye 
 shall receive ; seek, and ye shall find ; knock, and 
 it shall be opened." And only so. 
 
 But manifestly, in saying this we imply that 
 no temporal benefit, however high or true, ex- 
 hausts our thought of what we need from God. 
 
"Lord, Teach us to Pray." 27 
 
 Our deepest wants are those which touch no 
 other human spirit, — which no outward pos- 
 session can satisfy. The soul meets problems 
 of duty, and our unaided wisdom is not able 
 to solve them. We need an absolute standard 
 of right to regulate our conduct. How shall we 
 obtain it, unless by turning our thoughts to the 
 Highest ? We rise from the self-flattery which 
 misleads and from the flattery of others which 
 blinds us, to Him who " trieth the heart," and 
 we are at once in a different position. The 
 very fact that we have assumed such an atti- 
 tude of spirit must avail much. In prayer, 
 ordinary things fall away from the soul and 
 leave us face to face with the things of the 
 spirit. In prayer comes that holy calmness of 
 soul in which its still depths reflect truly our 
 responsibleness and our actual life, with their 
 grave, clear outlines undistorted. In prayer, 
 and in prayer alone, the spirit touches its 
 highest reach of spiritual life, and is attuned 
 to receive the light and strength without which 
 the human spirit in its uttermost times of need 
 must droop and fail. 
 
28 "Lord, Teach us to Pray." 
 
 " Be not afraid to pray ; to pray is right. 
 Pray, if thou canst, with hope ; but ever pray, 
 Though hope be weak, or sick with long delay ; 
 Pray in the darkness, if there be no light. 
 Far is the time, remote from human sight, 
 "When war and discord on the earth shall cease ; 
 Yet every prayer for universal peace 
 Avails the blessed time to expedite. 
 Whate'er is good to wish, ask that of Heaven, 
 Though it be what thou canst not hope to see ; 
 Pray to be perfect, though material leaven 
 Forbid the spirit so on earth to be ; 
 But if for any wish thou dar'st not pray, 
 Then pray to God to cast that wish away." l 
 
 We need, too, to pray in order to deepen our 
 thankfulness to God. We go on from day to 
 day, often almost without thought of Him to 
 whom we owe the gift of our happiness and 
 the blessing which He has hidden even in our 
 pain. Prayer gives us time to think, and brings 
 a light above the earth into our thought. We 
 pause on that mount of vision, and as the soul 
 draws closer to God His presence fills all things 
 with good. The beauty of the world of nature 
 in its spotless robe of winter white, is as His 
 new creation. The deep happiness which lies 
 
 1 Hartley Coleridge. 
 
"Lord, Teach us to Pray." 29 
 
 at the heart of so many hours of every human 
 life has a deeper undertone of blessedness. And 
 even grief and suffering, in the light of prayer, 
 turn to our eyes the " silver lining " of their 
 cloud. The soul may resort to prayer from 
 the sense of its weakness, its bitter need ; but 
 when the spirit of prayer is with it, it will 
 pass from seeking into gratitude, and will give 
 thanks, though it be with Christ, over " the 
 cup which is not wine, but sorrow, fear, and 
 blood/' 
 
 Through gratitude to communion ! The high- 
 est end of prayer is to bring us to that living 
 intercourse with the Living Father of our spirits 
 which is intended to be the greatest joy of the 
 soul. The prayer that seeks for some earthly 
 blessing or some spiritual gift from God, in a 
 right spirit, is undoubtedly a true prayer. If 
 we do not begin by such seeking, it may be 
 that we shall never truly pray at all. But 
 the prayerful spirit learns to rise high above 
 such conditions of intercourse with God, into 
 pure communion with Him as the Fountain of 
 its spiritual life. Petition becomes a devout 
 
30 "Lord, Teach us to Pray:' 
 
 desire to rest in Him, to trust Him utterly. 
 We come to ask less and less of Him for our- 
 selves and for those dearest to us, — except that 
 he will give us of Himself. 
 
 The prayer which Christ has given us as the 
 measure and rule of our worship and our faith, 
 begins and ends with God, — " Our Father . . . 
 whose is the kingdom, power, and glory." Surely, 
 friends, we ought to ask that this may be su- 
 premely the habit of our soul. To be real and 
 yet at the same time to be submissive, — wrest- 
 ling with the Lord yet waiting upon the Lord, 
 — our prayer must breathe forth from calm, 
 deep places, where the spirit of prayer has 
 brooded long, like the dove upon the waters. 
 It need not always be in spoken words : hardly 
 need it always even be syllabled in the thought. 
 Yet thought and words will be the garment in 
 which the deep spiritual consciousness which 
 is the inner essence of prayer will naturally 
 clothe itself. 
 
 Without a spirit of trusting confidence, w T hat 
 can lend wings or life to the prayer which 
 strives to rise heavenward ? Its home is on 
 
"Lord, Teach us to Pray" 31 
 
 the earth, among cold dispositions and un- 
 spiritual thoughts. But prayer with faith is 
 the laying hold by the spirit on things beyond 
 the senses' grasp. It is drawing near to God 
 as our Heavenly Friend, our Father. "Prayer," 
 said Coleridge, "is faith passing into act." 
 
 Who would not desire to bring the Divine 
 Life, the Divine Presence, into our daily con- 
 sciousness, to transfigure the common things 
 about us by that light? 
 
OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN 
 HEAVEN. 
 
II. 
 
 OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN. 
 
 After this manner, therefore, pray ye : Our Father 
 which art in heaven. — Matt. vi. 9. 
 
 " A FTER this manner ! " When Christ bids 
 -*■ ^ his followers pray thus, he tells us in 
 substance that the few sentences of the Lord's 
 Prayer are the essence of all prayer. Since 
 prayer addresses God, he teaches us first of all 
 how to think of Him; since prayer speaks to 
 Him of our wants, he teaches us how we are 
 to think of ourselves; and since these things 
 are the very things which most concern us to 
 know, he is really teaching us in this prayer 
 the sum of all theology, as well as how to 
 pray. 
 
 The first words of this mighty prayer lift us 
 at once to the highest level. 
 
 Christianity has well been called "a dispen- 
 sation of encouragement." The principles of 
 the gospel and the mighty life of Christ an- 
 
36 Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 
 
 swer through and through to our need to be 
 braced and heartened in the religious life. 
 And what is the breath of life of this Chris- 
 tian Gospel, so alive with hope ? Is it not this, 
 that it is possible for men to know and to love 
 God, as children know their father ? From the 
 Sermon on the Mount to the deep words spoken 
 at the Last Supper, from the whole spirit of his 
 Gospel, and from that one solitary Life which 
 includes all this while it is itself more than 
 all, arises the same voice as the key-note : 
 God, our Father. 
 
 It was not always so. When Jesus taught 
 his disciples to call God by that name, he gave 
 them not only the greatest thought, but what 
 was a new thought. Their religion, the reli- 
 gion of the Jews, knew Him by noble names, 
 presented Him in sublime and living concep- 
 tions. But in all the references to the Supreme 
 One in the Old Testament, " He is mentioned 
 just seven times as a Father, — five times as the 
 Father of the Hebrew people, twice as sustain- 
 ing that relation to individuals. Of these two 
 intimations that God is the Father of individual 
 
Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 37 
 
 men, one is a promise to David that God will be 
 a Father to his son Solomon ; the other is a pre- 
 diction that by and by men will pray to God, 
 calling him Father, — a prediction fulfilled in this 
 prayer. For there is no record of any prayer in 
 the Old Testament in which God is addressed 
 as Father." 1 So, then, when Christ taught them 
 to know the Mighty, the Eternal One by that 
 name, he opened to them a new world of ten- 
 der pieties and warm and living faith. 
 
 Yet I suppose that there are many persons 
 who, in the theory of what virtuous living is, re- 
 duce religion solely to the practice of good mor- 
 als, from the fear of mixing with it something 
 ecstatic or extravagant or absurd. Just as our 
 American atmosphere has little of soft haze and 
 transfiguring shadows in it, but is hard and clear 
 in outline, a dazzling overflow of pure, dry 
 light, so our religious climate is unfavorable to 
 anything mysterious, or which transcends the 
 senses ; and there is many a man who has a 
 clear insight into the duties which concern liv- 
 ing well on this earth, whose horizon has a per- 
 1 Washington Gladden. 
 
38 Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 
 
 fectly defined, hard outline, beyond which he 
 does not know or care to go, and which shuts 
 down on this side of the whole range of spirit- 
 ual duties and affections. 
 
 And yet, that we need something more, I 
 suppose that the coolest brain and the most 
 clear-sighted mind among us all would be the 
 quickest to admit. For they ought to know 
 most powerfully how many hindrances stand 
 in the way of our acting as if we were moral 
 machines, which needed only to be wound up 
 for every cog and wheel to run in order. Is it 
 so easy, then, for you to keep the little, petty 
 things of life from marring your peace ? Is it 
 so easy to prevent the unworthiness of those 
 whom you trusted, the selfishness of those whom 
 perhaps you have labored for and sacrificed your- 
 self for, from clouding your faith in human good- 
 ness ? Is it so easy to keep your own faith in 
 the law T of goodness, when you are tempted to 
 be unjust, unkind, impure ? There is no one 
 who has really lived at all who does not know 
 that we need the most transforming and em- 
 powering motives that can be brought into our 
 
Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 39 
 
 souls, just to help us do the least, common thiDg 
 that we have to do every day, rightly and well. 
 The way of the world has too often been the 
 contrary, — narrow the minds that have to do 
 with narrow things ; keep the poor ignorant ; 
 exclude the light from the ground-story of our 
 civilization ; let those who have to do drudgeries 
 do them in a menial spirit. But not so Jesus 
 Christ. He recognizes that the mind will only 
 fulfil the lowest possible task when it has been 
 filled full with the greatest possible thought. 
 And so he calls men, all men, to open their 
 whole being to the transforming possession of 
 the thought of God and what follows therefrom, 
 — love to Him and to His children. That is 
 a mighty phrase of Dr. Chalmers, in which he 
 speaks of " the expulsive power of a great affec- 
 tion." Who is he so poor as not to know some- 
 thing of what that means, — how the love of 
 one human soul for another will drive out the 
 baser passions that lurk like creeping things in 
 the dark recesses of the human spirit ? In the 
 presence of that radiant angel shining with the 
 light of God's countenance, in the love of parent 
 
40 Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 
 
 and child, of husband and wife, how do selfish- 
 ness, hardness, uncleanness, shrink away ! Now, 
 religion would not be religion if it did not give 
 us the greatest affection of all, a supreme spirit, 
 of which these finest and purest earthly rela- 
 tions are signs and illustrations, — something 
 which would bring the most spiritual motive to 
 bear on us in the same way as these highest 
 and best motives in our common life are brought 
 to bear on that to ennoble it. There must be, 
 then, even if you do not understand it, — even 
 if this side of religion seems to you mystical 
 and incomprehensible, — still there must be 
 some real and vital sense in which we can 
 speak of God as our Father. If there are 
 common misconceptions of the nature of the 
 love of God, it behooves us the more to ask 
 what is its real character. If there are prac- 
 tical difficulties in the way of our loving Him, 
 we should seek the more to remove them. 
 
 This great spiritual affection which Christ 
 names love to God, so far from being ecstatic 
 or extravagant, is the chief safeguard in religion 
 against excess. It i$ : the very foundation on 
 
Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 41 
 
 which all true and rational religion must be 
 built. But it must be admitted that the sim- 
 ple and natural understanding of the great com- 
 mandment has been rendered far more difficult 
 by the erroneous methods of interpreting it 
 pursued by great schools of Christian theology. 
 And one or another of these partial definitions 
 of what the love of God means do to this hour, 
 I believe, profoundly color the ideas on this 
 subject of many persons who belong to the 
 most modern, most rational schools of thought. 
 We are heirs of the past to a greater degree 
 than we are aware. From the Middle Ages 
 we inherit the unconscious tendency to meas- 
 ure spiritual feeling by extravagance of ex- 
 pression ; from two centuries of New England 
 parentage, an inborn zest for theological subtle- 
 ties; and either way, we hold too narrow an 
 idea of what this spiritual affection is. We 
 need to go back to Jesus Christ, and look at 
 it in his light. And when we thus bring the 
 New Testament spirit to bear upon the inter- 
 pretation of the great commandment, we at once 
 find that in its genuine and true and Scrip- 
 
42 Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 
 
 tural sense, love to God is not a mere sentiment 
 dependent upon the happy possession of a glow- 
 ing temperament, nor only a fervid expression 
 of devout feeling called into being, quickened 
 "by supernatural grace ; these are only special 
 manifestations of it in partial forms. But un- 
 derlying them and manifesting itself in many 
 other ways also quite as true and as worthy, 
 it exists as a great persuasive principle of life, 
 vitalizing the whole being in the soul which 
 religion has entered as a power. Jesus Christ 
 does not say, " Thou shalt love Him with all thy 
 heart," and stop there, but " with all thy heart 
 and with all thy soul and with all thy mind 
 and with all thy strength," — that is, with all 
 that is in you of affection, of spiritual aspira- 
 tion, of understanding, of active service. Why 
 should we suppose for a moment that love to 
 God is any less wide or less real an affection 
 than love in any of our earthly relations ? In- 
 terpret its breadth by these fair and dear ties 
 which you know so well. You do not love 
 your parent or your child with a mere senti- 
 ment, pleased with pleasant thoughts about 
 
Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 43 
 
 them ; you love them with your life, — the 
 whole of what you are at your best. Perhaps 
 you hardly ever put before yourself in set 
 thoughts whether you love them or not. The 
 affection is too deep and thorough to be thought 
 about or talked about ; it simply is. With your 
 heart, yes ; but with your soul too, for it is the 
 immortal part in them which is closest to you ; 
 with the mind, ever busy with thoughtfulness 
 for them ; with the strength, that where you 
 really love is eager to spend itself in doing 
 something for them. Eeason from this to the 
 quality of love for our Father in heaven. 
 Whether its prevailing character will be emo- 
 tional or moral, intellectual or practical, will 
 depend on the general bent of the individual, 
 — what we call the personal temperament ; but 
 to all alike it belongs to love Him with what 
 they are. 
 
 It is true, indeed, that here we reason only 
 from analogy, and dimly. We cannot reduce 
 to nothing the mystery which separates the 
 human from the Divine. He retires before 
 our thought into the awful depths of His 
 
44 Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 
 
 infinite nature. How shall man dare to com- 
 mune with Him who hideth Himself behind 
 the brightness of the firmament, and whom 
 the heaven of heavens cannot contain ? But 
 we carry this fitting sense of awe too far if 
 we account it impossible in any way to hold 
 communion with Him. For there are yearn- 
 ings within the soul which were created that 
 they might be satisfied; and unless the signs 
 of His lovingkindness which fill the world of 
 every one of us called forth an answering 
 feeling, we should be dull of heart indeed. 
 In whatever other ways the intercourse of the 
 human spirit with the Infinite Spirit differs 
 from that of man with man, it does so not 
 least in this, — that the eye, the voice, the 
 hand, which are so large a part of your friend, 
 are absent when you hold converse with the 
 Father of spirits " in spirit and in truth." But 
 it may be a far closer, more real relation than 
 that which you hold to your friend when ab- 
 sent. Though the farthest seas roll between, 
 and for years you have been parted, you love 
 him, you shape your life with reference to him. 
 
Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 45 
 
 It would be strange if it were impossible to do 
 as much w T hen it is with Him who filleth all 
 things, and reads and knows your most hidden 
 thought, that you have to do, 
 
 In one regard, indeed, this spiritual attitude 
 toward the Supreme Euler of our life and Father 
 of our spirits has a manifest advantage over your 
 love for your friend. There is something in the 
 personal visible presence of one you care for, 
 which forbids any analysis of character. You 
 do not half know the person whom you love. 
 Seldom do you appreciate the qualities wrapped 
 up in a beloved person until the stern mes- 
 senger comes who takes away your compan- 
 ion, though it be with strong crying and tears, 
 and leaves you with what was really your 
 friend, — the character for the first time truly 
 known. 
 
 But this personal attitude of love and trust 
 toward God as our Father in heaven must 
 always be largely and may be almost wholly 
 manifested toward the qualities of the Divine 
 nature. It has to do with the affections and 
 principles of our nature in their highest sense. 
 
46 Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 
 
 It is an attitude of the whole being, " heart and 
 soul and mind and strength," toward the quali- 
 ties which are attributes of God. And so we 
 have a right to say that many a soul, by recog- 
 nizing and obeying as Divine impulses those no- 
 ble instincts which God has implanted in every 
 human heart, has been loving Him even though 
 it knew it not. When, for example, men have 
 been loyal to the natural sense of justice which 
 bade them deal honorably with their neighbor, 
 it shows that they love a quality which eter- 
 nally belongs to the Holy and Just One. Or 
 when they are obedient to that higher hospi- 
 tality which ministers to the needy, the op- 
 pressed, the forsaken, they show their love for 
 that principle of love which is the very heart 
 of God's own nature. You are faithful, per- 
 haps, in the plain tasks of your common do- 
 mestic cares, bringing with them the spirit of 
 self-surrender, and receiving them as opportu- 
 nities sent you by your Heavenly Father ; you 
 have learned something of the secret which so 
 transfigures trial and privation as to make them 
 even set off by their dull foil the beauty of 
 
Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 47 
 
 faithful character. Is not this some sign of 
 childlike love for His character and of trust in 
 the fatherly dealings of Him who "maketh 
 everything beautiful in His time " ? 
 
 Yes ! it is a divine, a blessed decree, that in 
 obeying the best impulse of the heart towards 
 what is holy and good and true, we are led into 
 sympathy with Him in whom all perfections 
 are in their fulness. 
 
 The relation of the child with the Father is 
 something more, when it is perfected, when it 
 comes to the knowledge of itself, than loyal 
 affection for the abstract qualities which are 
 in the Divine Being. In order that the reli- 
 gion of our lives may be kindled into a living 
 flame, we need to feel that these qualities exist 
 in a Person whom we can call by the fatherly 
 name, of whom we may dare to think with the 
 filial thought. The affection which we feel for 
 Justice or Truth or Love, as abstract principles, 
 is but cold in comparison with that for One 
 who is just and true and loving. 
 
 So we come to see the force of those words 
 of our prayer, " which art." The need of our 
 
48 Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 
 
 lives and of our souls is to feel a living con- 
 viction of the real and living Being of God, 
 as the One in whom existence is in all its 
 fulness, — not One simply for us to read of or 
 to hear of, but to know as the Person with- 
 out whom the universe would be empty for us, 
 without whom we could not live, in whom we 
 shall find all beside that we love and long for, 
 — Our Father, the Living God. 
 
 If we can but know Him as that, if we can 
 but love Him as that, what a meaning will it 
 not put upon the face of all things ! 
 
 The cry of the soul is always for the Living 
 God. And what is every breathing forth of 
 our desire for succors from the unseen source 
 of strength, but a witness that He is one who 
 will answer ? Is there nothing which speaks 
 with proof of the attributes and the character 
 of the Father of pity and God of all comfort 
 in these voices of the soul ? The earnest long- 
 ing of the spirit newly roused to the sense that 
 it is His child, the plaintive supplication of the 
 wounded heart in the freshness of a great sor- 
 row, the upliftings which sometimes visit the 
 
Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 49 
 
 soul like a tidal wave and sweep it on their 
 surging crest to spiritual thoughts far beyond 
 its reach at common times, — to deny that 
 these things witness to God is to strike a 
 blow at the truth of human consciousness. 
 Only they who have never felt these experi- 
 ences can doubt their power of revelation. 
 
 The heart that glows with the new love of 
 a regenerated child of God knows Him; the 
 eyes that look upward through tears, see be- 
 yond the veil that hides Him from us ; the 
 soul that reaches out after heaven lays hold 
 on that which it seeks. There are moments 
 in such spiritual life when the soul seems to 
 pass beyond the boundaries of space and time, 
 and feels that it touches the Infinite Presence, 
 and can even understand some hint of the mean- 
 ing of our Saviour when he said, "I and my 
 Father are one." 
 
 If you have gone thus far with me, you will 
 feel that each word in this great sentence of 
 our prayer is full of light, which to fully focus 
 for us would ask more time for each word than 
 
 4 
 
50 Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 
 
 we have here together. Let us look at them 
 only briefly, then, before I close. 
 
 Mr. Maurice has well said that " much of the 
 practical difficulty of the prayer lies in the first 
 word of it. How can we look round on the 
 people whom we habitually feel to be separated 
 from us by almost impassable barriers, . . . and 
 then teach ourselves to think that in the very 
 highest exercise of our lives they are associated 
 with us ; that when we pray w T e are praying for 
 them and with them ; that we cannot speak for 
 ourselves without speaking for them ; that if we 
 do not carry their sins to the throne of God's 
 grace, we do not carry our own ; that all 
 the good we hope to obtain there belongs to 
 them just as much as to us. . . . Yet all this 
 is included in the word 'our;' till we have 
 learned so much we are but spelling at it, we 
 have not learned to pronounce it." 
 
 Have we so learned, any one of us, dear 
 friends ? Tor if we have hard thoughts about 
 any in our hearts ; if we find it difficult to 
 hold them graciously and tenderly in our re- 
 membrance as we rise to the great thought 
 
Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 51 
 
 of God; if we fail to grasp the sublime con- 
 ception of "the whole family in heaven and 
 earth " which is named of Him, we can hardly 
 pass this portal of our Lord's Prayer into the 
 deeper meaning of the sanctuary within. We 
 do not really pray to Him unless we are will- 
 ing to kneel, as it were, on the outer step of 
 His temple, beside the publican and the sin- 
 ner. We can hardly dare to call him Father, 
 unless we will also call them our brethren. 
 
 But there is not only a lesson of humility 
 and of charity for us when we begin to say 
 " Our Father, " — there is infinite hope and 
 cheer. For if we all come together before 
 him, we may well feel upborne by the pray- 
 ing might of all who are higher than we on 
 the shining ladder that leads to the foot of 
 His throne, — His saints and faithful children, 
 all that great company who are joined in the 
 praises of the Te Deum. 
 
 If our prayers for ourselves form a part of 
 the Divine government of the individual, our 
 prayers for one another surely must form a 
 part of the Divine government of society. 
 
52 Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 
 
 Be not afraid to lift your thought of those 
 you love, your care for them, into the light of 
 God's presence. To pray for them is often the 
 only thing you can do for them. And surely 
 the scope of these opening words of this great 
 prayer does not stop at the horizon-line be- 
 tween earth and heaven. If there be any pe- 
 tition in it which God's angels do not need 
 to utter, it is not these words, "Our Father." 
 Dante represents the great company of the re- 
 deemed whom he saw in his vision of Paradise 
 bursting forth in this prayer together. They 
 are the only human words great enough and 
 high enough for us to imagine on those puri- 
 fied lips. But we can think — and we have a 
 right to think — that through that prayer, blend- 
 ing us even with their thought of God, they 
 reach out to us to lift our need into His light. 
 Shall we not also feel that we can blend them 
 too with our deepest prayer, — that our love 
 and our sorrow can reach up after them and 
 find them in His presence, and can ask for 
 them and win for them more of His light, more 
 of His peace? 
 
Our Father Wliich Art in Heaven. 53 
 
 " Our Father which art in heaven." The 
 closing words of this name by which we know 
 Him are surely not the least part of our knowl- 
 edge. " In heaven," — how the clear shining of 
 that thought dissipates like a beam of morning 
 light all the mists of darkness which have gath- 
 ered about low and unworthy conceptions of 
 what God is ! All the old idols fell from 
 their altars at this word wliich reveals the 
 Living God dwelling in light, inaccessible and 
 full of glory. Is the peril wholly past with any 
 of us ? Do you never set up an* image in your 
 own heart, of wealth or power or success or 
 pleasure, and worship it? For if you do, let 
 your prayer to your Father in heaven tone 
 your soul to a worthier worship. If the real 
 prayer of your soul, if that to which you really 
 bend your life, is less than the loftiest and 
 purest and holiest vision to which you can 
 lift your thought, it is not the Being, awful 
 in height and purity, whom Christ teaches us 
 to name Our Father. "Who art in heaven." 
 We may not know where heaven is ; to figure 
 forth its glories in our poor human speech, or 
 
54 Our Father Which Art in Heaven. 
 
 even to shadow them forth in our dim thought, 
 we may not dare. But we know that where God 
 is, heaven is. There is something of it in every 
 pure soul, in every faithful life. The holy ones 
 who have passed from such a life here have 
 "breathed free the blessed air of heaven, and 
 knew their native air." And we are called to 
 rise to this level of desire and hope. " Beloved," 
 says the Apostle, " now are we the sons of God, 
 and it doth not yet appear what we shall be ; but 
 we know that when He shall appear we shall be 
 like Him ; for we shall see Him as he is. And 
 every man that hath this hope in him purifieth 
 himself, even as He is pure." 
 
HALLOWED BE THY NAME. 
 
m. 
 
 HALLOWED BE THY NAME. 
 
 Hallowed he thy name. — Matt. vi. 9. 
 
 TVTAMES have a deeper connection with 
 - " things than we sometimes think. There 
 was a time in the earlier ages of the life of the 
 human family when the name of any object had 
 a living interest attaching to it. It fitted natu- 
 rally to that thing which it described. The 
 same novelty and beauty which men saw in 
 the universe into which the race was newly 
 born to consciousness and knowledge of itself, 
 sparkled and shone in the speech which de- 
 scribed these transcendent wonders. Language 
 has become common now. We use words as 
 counters of convenience. Only when we pause 
 and reflect upon it do we realize that the count- 
 ers are of pure gold. The science of language, 
 by tracing the mutations of human speech and 
 the laws by which they are governed, has gone 
 
58 Hallowed he Thy Name. 
 
 far with its students to restore to words their 
 primitive freshness. But in our usual use they 
 are still rusted over with commonness. 
 
 With the names of persons the case is very 
 different. Here the instinct of individuality 
 preserves the name as in some sort sacred. A 
 man cannot change his name at will, to suit 
 his own pleasure. He who forges the signa- 
 ture of another is a criminal in the eye of 
 the law. The name is a part of the very 
 self. 
 
 Thus we are led to understand the connection 
 of religion with the words which are the ex- 
 pression of its mighty thoughts. What philol- 
 ogy does for the phrase of our daily speech, 
 what the strong instinct of individuality does 
 for the personal name, — exactly that, only in 
 a far more eminent degree, religion does for 
 its own great words in the forms of language 
 which it uses. It fills them out with their own 
 true fulness of meaning. 
 
 The name of sin expresses the awful power 
 of evil, involving unutterable suffering to those 
 who fall beneath its dominion ; the name of soul 
 
Hallowed he Thy Name. 59 
 
 expresses all the vast, mysterious endowments 
 which are wrapped up in our spiritual nature ; 
 the name of our Lord Jesus Christ expresses 
 the power of his religion, x the vital spiritual 
 force which renders the truths of religion op- 
 erative upon the human heart (as the great 
 phrase of the fathers has it), the saving power 
 of the gospel of Christ. You cannot separate 
 these in your thought from him in whom 
 the principles of Christianity were inseparably 
 bound up. And the Supreme Name of all, 
 the Awful Name of God, expresses the souls 
 idea of infinite power and wisdom and love, 
 — all those attributes which inhere in our 
 thought of the Euler of the Universe, all- 
 wise, all-powerful, all-holy, and all-good. 
 
 We can see, then, why it is that our Saviour, 
 in teaching his disciples to pray, should make 
 them ask, as their very first request, something 
 connected with this Name, — that is to say, 
 with this supreme thought of God. There are 
 other things which are good for us, necessary 
 for us, which, on our usual theory of what 
 prayer is, we should begin by asking for. 
 
60 Halloived he Thy Name. 
 
 What can we ask for more urgently than that 
 without which we should starve, — the bread 
 of each day, whose food we must have to keep 
 us in the life of this body ; the bread of the 
 mind, whose sweet and wholesome thoughts we 
 must have to nourish us ; the bread of the heart, 
 to sustain us with love and comfort us with the 
 solace of dear companionships ; the bread of the 
 soul, to be ennobled by high, devout thoughts, 
 and to feel that we are growing purer, better ? 
 This on one side of our need; and then yet 
 deeper, more intense, the cry of the spirit, in 
 its bitter sense of shortcoming and sinfulness, 
 for pardon and reconciliation. Sooner than the 
 very food without which we die, give me, — is 
 the prayer of the soul, — give me some prom- 
 ise that I shall be lifted out of this slough of 
 despond at my own weakness and wanderings 
 from God ; lift a light upon me which shall 
 show me the way I can walk in, and roll off 
 from me the burdens which hinder me therein. 
 
 Give me and forgive me ; these two petitions 
 are the substance of liturgies and prayers, — 
 the natural asking of the soul when it passes 
 
Hallowed be Thy Name. 61 
 
 out from the chambers of self-content and seeks 
 to enter the presence of the All-Giver by the 
 portal of prayer. And Christ recognizes by and 
 by, a little later, in this great prayer of his, 
 that these needs are true, that only God can 
 satisfy them, that their cry to Him is right and 
 fit. Only, he says, not yet, not yet. You must 
 begin on a higher plane even than your own 
 consciousness of your need, if you will save your 
 need from degenerating into a self-absorbed and 
 self-seeking cry. We can be selfish even in our 
 prayers. How many Te Deums have been sung 
 in great cathedrals for victory over one's ene- 
 mies, in utter forgetfulness of this truth ! How 
 many Christian men have prayed in health and 
 wealth long to live, and have really begun and 
 ended all that was genuine in their prayers with 
 that! How many have even besought forgive- 
 ness of their Maker, not so much from love to 
 Him and desire to be in accord with His perfect 
 law of righteousness, as from a sense of personal 
 discomfort, and a desire to have it removed ! 
 
 Think, therefore, first of all, our Master bids 
 us, of that which is infinitely above yourself. 
 
62 Hallowed be Thy Name. 
 
 Till your soul with the great thought of God. 
 If you lift your soul to it, you will lift your 
 soul's desires also to a point where they will be 
 purged from selfishness, and their answer will 
 be such as you can safely bear. 
 
 The duty of reverence in our thought of the 
 eternal Name is no new duty, indeed, of Chris- 
 tianity. For if you should ask me what was 
 the central truth of the ancient religion, — of 
 the religion of the Hebrews, — I should an- 
 swer, it was an awful reverence . for God. 
 That treasure it enshrined and has passed on 
 to the Christian Church, with all the conse- 
 crating veneration of four thousand years, — 
 from Abraham to Moses, from Moses again to 
 Christ. Yet this great thought was not easily 
 enrooted in the Hebrew mind ; nor was it the 
 common possession of good men and women, 
 as it is to-day. As we look back through the 
 centuries which went to the ripening of this 
 consummate fruit of pious reverence in the 
 souls of men, it is a process, long and slow, 
 that we behold, — not the instant grasp of a 
 great inspiring vision by a whole race. That 
 
Hallowed be Thy Name. 63 
 
 which was revelation to a few — the morning 
 sunlight touching the mountain summits, lofty 
 souls that looked toward the day — was to the 
 mass slow and painful teaching. They looked 
 up to the glow of the morning on those heights 
 whose pure snows were touched with " God's 
 awful rose of dawn;" but they themselves were 
 in the valley. Only so can you explain the 
 repeated lapses of the Jews into idolatries, their 
 golden calves and worship in groves and going 
 after strange gods, accepting the sensuous rites 
 of the nations round them, — Astarte, Moloch, 
 and the rest. They had hardly learned the 
 alphabet in which the name of the living God 
 is spelled, And so the whole religion of the 
 Hebrews, as we read it in our Old Testament, 
 may be said to be one long schooling in the 
 spelling of that Name. The Levitical law, with 
 its ritual of external observances, all tends to 
 teach this thought of sacredness through the 
 sanctities of habit and usage which it impresses 
 upon every detail of life on its religious side. 
 The prophets burn and glow with this divine 
 fire ; the sacred law has it for its solemn under- 
 
64 Hallowed be Thy Name. 
 
 tone. The history shows us a people slowly- 
 struggling, with many a slipping back, toward 
 that which it did not really attain till it had 
 been ground to powder in the great Captivity, 
 — the faith in God as their God. Yet all the 
 time the ideal was there, summed up in the com- 
 mandment, "Thou shalt not take the name of 
 the Lord thy God in vain." Not only in the 
 Law, but outside of the Law and beyond it, 
 the Jews w T ere taught to hold in veneration the 
 word which represented God to them. They 
 were not even allowed to speak it aloud when 
 they read the sacred book. Their scribes could 
 not write it, except with a pen which had not 
 been used before. By and by another word 
 would be substituted for it ; or they could not 
 write it at all in full, but only with a few let- 
 ters of the word; and no one to-day certainly 
 knows how that name which we spell Jehovah 
 was pronounced. 
 
 All this belonged to the period after the 
 Captivity, when, as I have said, the veneration 
 for the sacred Name was deepening down into 
 the hearts of the people, — formal, blind, and 
 
Hallowed he Thy Name. 65 
 
 outward often, doubtless, but making the foun- 
 dation-ground on which faith in that which the 
 Name stands for could be built up. 
 
 1. The first thing, then, that we ask for in this 
 petition is that this reverence which the Chris- 
 tian ages have ripened may be in ourselves, — 
 that we may have a hallowed and hallowing 
 sense of what that Name really means. It 
 means much, unspeakably much, as we read it 
 in the Bible, in that succession of names, each 
 indicating a growing and greatening conception 
 of the Divine character, and only partly made 
 clear to the English reader, even in the Eevised 
 Version of the Old Testament. Far back in the 
 beginning He is disclosed as Elohim, the creative 
 powers which other peoples worshipped in scat- 
 tered manifestations, brought to a focus, so to 
 speak, in the one Creator. Then follows the 
 patriarchal period, when men know Him as 
 El Shaddai, the Almighty; and then the great 
 revelation to Moses, " I am Jehovah ; and I 
 appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto 
 Jacob as God Almighty; but by my name 
 Jehovah I was not known to them," — that 
 5 
 
66 Hallowed be Thy Name. 
 
 is, as the self-existent Being, the Living God. 
 And then came Christ, showing us that this 
 God is fatherly. 
 
 All these great names which we owe to our 
 religion teach us sides of the Divine nature. 
 Yet the full meaning of each must be disclosed 
 by fresh light for each heart and soul freshly ; 
 and it would be atheism for us to say that 
 He had exhausted all manifestations of Him- 
 self. " There is no word that is large enough 
 to hold all the truth that God has told men 
 about Himself." 
 
 He w r rites that Name in unsyllabled charac- 
 ters on the earth and on the sky, in the beauty 
 and the blessing of this vast and radiant universe 
 which He has made. He reveals Himself to the 
 reverent eye in the great march of human his- 
 tory, and in the Providence which such an eye 
 cannot but trace in countless lives. He speaks 
 in that august life of power and help in which 
 Jesus Christ, His well-beloved Son, has forever 
 made His presence a fact not to be gainsaid or 
 denied, — the incarnate Word of the God who is 
 our Father, speaking to us in accents of grace 
 
Hallowed be Thy Name. 67 
 
 and truth. And in that pleading Spirit which 
 is God in living contact with the living soul 
 of His child, he makes all things new for whom- 
 soever will receive it. 
 
 We live in a universe that is full of the 
 manifested God, for those who will see Him, 
 — always full of His presence and His power; 
 more and more clearly known through the dis- 
 closures all along the ages to saints and sages, 
 who, as they travelled along the different paths 
 of faith or knowledge or hope or love, have seen 
 His light shining on their way. What prayer 
 so w T ell befits human beings in this overpower- 
 ing Presence as the prayer, "Hallowed be thy 
 Name"? 
 
 2. But that which ought to be the heart of 
 our desire toward God is deeper and closer even 
 than this attitude toward His disclosures of His 
 great Name. It should be nothing less than that 
 His Name might utter itself through us, through 
 our own personal thought of Him, — the concep- 
 tion of His character which we make the motive 
 pow T er of our life. There is an eternal truth 
 in that mysterious narrative in the book of 
 
68 Hallowed be Thy Name. 
 
 Genesis which describes Jacob wrestling with 
 the unseen Power "until the breaking of the 
 day." "And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell 
 me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, 
 Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my 
 name ? And he blessed him there." 
 
 " Come, thou traveller unknown, 
 Whom still I hold, but cannot see ! 
 My company before is gone, 
 
 And I am left alone with thee. 
 With thee all night I mean to stay, 
 And wrestle till the break of day. 
 . . • . • 
 
 " Yield to me now, for I am weak, 
 But confident in self- despair ; 
 Speak to my heart, in blessings speak ; 
 Be conquered by my instant prayer. 
 Speak ! or thou never hence shalt move, 
 And tell me if thy name be Love. 
 
 " My prayer hath power with God ; the grace 
 
 Unspeakable I now receive ; 
 Through faith I see thee face to face, — 
 
 I see thee face to face and live ! 
 In vain I have not wept and strove ; 
 
 Thy nature and thy name is Love." 
 
 It is the personal struggle for a noble, a living 
 conception of God — for a name by which we can 
 
Hallowed he Thy Name. 69 
 
 call Him with all the best allegiance of our own 
 souls — which wins the blessing forevermore. 
 
 Tor we should not suffer ourselves to forget 
 that what a man thinks, feels, believes about 
 God is the deepest thought and faith in him. 
 We all take the same name upon our lips ; but 
 there is an immense range in the real meaning 
 and dignity and value of that name to different 
 men and women. So it was that all the mon- 
 strous misgrowths and abominations of super- 
 stition arose in the beginning. Men believed 
 in a God ; there was that in their own souls 
 which compelled them thereto. But w 7 hat kind 
 of a God ? By what name should they call 
 him? And they distorted "the light which 
 lighteth every man that cometh into the world " 
 by all manner of broken refractions, till they 
 came to worship and cringe before that which 
 was lowest and worst, and called that divine. 
 Do you say that all this was long ago, — that 
 Christianity has changed all this ? Has it, then, 
 changed it wholly ? We have indeed discarded 
 the ancient misbeliefs ; but is there no danger 
 in the opposite extreme, — that we will have but 
 
70 Hallowed be Thy Name. 
 
 a very imperfect and powerless idea of God ? 
 Partial and incomplete must be the most per- 
 fect thought which we can have of Him, of 
 course. Yet what a gulf is there between the 
 thought of Him which some have, as relentless 
 will, power working by law without love, on 
 the one hand, or on the other, as a Being 
 who has relaxed the austere bonds of the moral 
 order of the universe, who does not care much 
 whether His children do right or wrong, but 
 will somehow save them from the consequences 
 of their own misdoing, — what a gulf, I say, 
 between either of these, and the pure and 
 living and powerful thought of Him which 
 is given to us in Jesus Christ, as our Father, 
 who loveth and worketh righteousness ! 
 
 It would be easy to show that everything 
 which we have to-day which is of real worth 
 in our modern life comes from men who have 
 had this great, vital conception of God. They 
 have not sat still in easy-going fashion, but 
 have wrestled as Jacob did for a name great 
 and worthy enough by which to call the Power 
 that ruled their lives, and have won that bless- 
 
Hallowed he Thy Name. 71 
 
 ing, and in winning it have won by their faith 
 and self-sacrifice everything that our civilization 
 gives us to-day. 
 
 And certainly, even though our highest thought 
 of Him can but dimly state His perfectness, we 
 must believe, if we look at it seriously, that it 
 will make an immense difference to us in the 
 way we live, in what we do, whether we think 
 of God as highly and as holily as we can, or 
 whether we fall short of that, — whether we 
 hallow His Name. 
 
 We know, indeed, that it is quite beyond 
 our power to hallow it worthily. To keep the 
 thought of God, in all the height and depth of 
 goodness and of greatness which are bound up 
 in the ineffable Name, so enshrined in our souls 
 that they shall always be possessed and over- 
 ruled by it, — that our business shall not crowd 
 it into the background, nor our weariness cause 
 it to fade away into dimness, nor our sorrow 
 darken its light, nor our temptations mar its 
 peace, nor our doubts shake its certainty, — 
 who of us is able ? Who of us sinful men 
 can keep that holy shrine in his soul for the 
 
72 Hallowed be Thy Name. 
 
 holy God ? It is just because we cannot, that 
 we pray God to do it. The very inspiration 
 of our religion is its teaching that the Living 
 God is able and willing so to make the souls 
 of His children His dwelling-place. 
 
 So, too, with what is really the other side of 
 our petition, — with the question what we can do 
 to help make His Name hallowed in the world. 
 What without Him we cannot do at all, with Him 
 we can do much to aid. The prayer that His 
 Name may be hallowed really asks that the time 
 may come when all men shall know Him and love 
 Him as the best men now know and love Him. 
 He answers such a prayer as that partly through 
 His faithful children doing something to make 
 Him more real in power and blessing to the 
 trust and loyalty of other men. When that 
 prayer is perfectly fulfilled it must be because 
 every one of us, not in our own strength but in 
 God's strength, has done something to persuade 
 our brethren that this world is God's world, 
 that they are His children. 
 
 Now, every life that makes clearer any scat- 
 tered gleam of any one of those eternal qualities 
 
Hallowed be Thy Name. 73 
 
 which are part of God's own nature, does thus 
 spell out some letter or syllable of His Name for 
 the acceptance of other hearts, who believe that 
 because they see it. The poor African women 
 who in their rude hut sheltered Mungo Park 
 in his adventurous exploration (in that story 
 so dear to the hearts of the boys of my gen- 
 eration), and gave him a mat to lie upon, and 
 pounded corn for his supper, while they sang, 
 " The white man has no mother to grind his 
 corn," did more to make God's pity a living 
 fact, though they only knew God by a dim 
 natural instinct — can we doubt it ? - — than 
 many a worshipper who bends the knee in a 
 Christian church, yet with a heart bitter toward 
 his fellow-men. The old Persians used to teach 
 their children, as a religious duty, to speak the 
 truth. Surely that fine sense of the fitness of 
 truth, the shame and disgrace of falsehood, was 
 a testimony to Him whose very name is truth, 
 and who has made the unerring order of the uni- 
 verse to be true to the end of time. Take it in 
 our own day. The engineer of the train wrecked 
 in a collision, who rushes to sure destruction 
 
74 Hallowed be Thy Name. 
 
 with his hand on the throttle of his engine, 
 when he might escape by leaping from his post 
 of duty, — why do you applaud instead of pity- 
 ing him ? Probe your judgment of the case to 
 the last analysis, and you will find that you 
 prize human faithfulness because it is in accord 
 w T ith the Divine fidelity, and testifies to Him one 
 of whose noblest names is the Faithful God. 
 
 We read a day or two ago how last Wednes- 
 day night, while we slept in the safe shelter of 
 our homes, a vessel bound for this port, coming 
 from southern sun and warmth, was driven in 
 the blinding snow-storm, at midnight, on Scituate 
 beach. Perhaps you have stood there in some 
 such wild fury of the elements, and watched 
 the tremendous uproar of the waves pounding 
 the solid shore as if they would drown the very 
 continent, while the beacon-tower far out at sea 
 tells only the little utmost that human power 
 can do to warn of the peril, — the nothing that 
 it can do to help. Was it because those brave 
 hearts did not hold life dear, that men were 
 there to launch the life-boat in those tumultuous 
 waters, and to rescue the shipwrecked men from 
 
Hallowed be Thy Name. 75 
 
 certain death in the horror of storm and cold 
 and darkness ? You are thrilled by their splen- 
 did courage, I say again, if you probe your feel- 
 ing to the last analysis, because it testifies to 
 the God who has made men worth saving, and 
 has given them the power of self-sacrifice. 
 
 Now take all these great and heroic traits of 
 human nature which do so much to make the 
 Divine power which rules our human lives 
 known and honored, and touch them with the 
 last and supreme trait which is possible to the 
 human soul, — ■ a conscious loyalty to God as 
 the Christian knows Him, as our Father. If He 
 is that, His children ought to have something 
 in them to show the likeness and to persuade 
 men to live holier, sweeter, purer lives by see- 
 ing His glory reflected in these human faces that 
 look up to His light. That was the way the 
 world was made Christian in the beginning ; men 
 beheld in the first disciples the reflected di- 
 vineness of that in the Lord Christ which 
 showed the Father ; and they rose and fol- 
 lowed where that light led, into newness of 
 life. Tt is so still. An Afghan once met 
 
76 Hallowed be Thy Name. 
 
 Dr. William Marsh, a saintly missionary, and 
 remained an hour in company with him. The 
 impression made by his character was so strong 
 as never to be forgotten; and when afterward 
 the Afghan learned of Dr. Marsh's death, he 
 said, "His religion shall now be my religion, 
 his God shall be my God ; for I must go where 
 he is and see his face again." 
 
 There can be few of us so poor as not to have 
 had something like that come true in our own 
 experience. The evidence of lives evidently 
 childlike, possessed and made holy by the spirit 
 of their Father, convinces us of immortality, be- 
 cause we are sure that He has looked on them 
 and is well pleased ; and " in His favor is life," 
 — convinces us of God, because we are sure 
 that the faith which is strong enough to carry 
 such souls to victory cannot be a delusion. 
 
 Such lives are the putting into effect of this 
 great and holy petition that His Name may be 
 hallowed. It is for us to make it ours in the 
 spirit of Christ: "Father, glorify Thy Name. 
 Then, came there a voice from heaven, saying, I 
 have both glorified it, and will glorify it again." 
 
THY KINGDOM COME. 
 
IV. 
 
 THY KINGDOM COME. 
 
 Thy kingdom come, — Matt. vi. 10. 
 
 TT^AS there ever a heart created so poor in 
 * * ideals and hopes as never to desire that 
 the world should improve; that things should 
 go on (if they were despondent) from bad to 
 good, or (if they were of cheerful tempera- 
 ment) from good to better? Was there ever 
 one who did not feel, no matter how bright or 
 masterful or conquering a life he succeeded in 
 living, that it was quite beyond his own power 
 to bring this future Golden Age to accomplish- 
 ment, even with himself in any perfect degree, 
 far more in any large way with the world. 
 
 The desire that a kingdom, a fairer realm, 
 than the present should come ; the sense that 
 it belongs to God and not to us, — these two 
 forces converge in the petition in our Lord's 
 Prayer, Thy kingdom come! 
 
80 Thy Kingdom Gome. 
 
 Yet there are more ways than one of pray- 
 ing it, more dispositions than one which may 
 feel that the prayer encourages their mental 
 attitude towards the world, filling it full of 
 their own meaning instead of finding Christ's 
 meaning — God's meaning — in this mighty 
 prayer. 
 
 There are those — and their name is Legion 
 in this active, generous, unselfish age of philan- 
 thropies and charities, of day-dreams of a mil- 
 lennium, or of earnest labors for the bettering 
 of humanity — who look to see a multitude of 
 wrongs set right. By wholesome teaching or 
 restraining laws, a more enlightened self-inter- 
 est or a more disinterested public spirit, they 
 hope to see the prayer put into effect. Thy 
 kingdom is not yet, they say. Evil men have 
 thus far hindered it; let it come to the weary 
 and struggling earth as the sun comes bringing 
 morning out of night. 
 
 Others there are, and not seldom these very 
 ones of whom I speak come to be such, for 
 whom even this vision of a redeemed and re- 
 newed earth does not exhaust the desire of 
 
Thy Kingdom Come. 81 
 
 their souls. They have tried the disappoint- 
 ments and the disillusions of life, and they 
 know full well that even if the poor vessel in 
 which all these earth-bound hopes are contained 
 — this globe itself — could be passed, so to 
 speak, through these fiery, regenerating heats, 
 which would make it over, porcelain instead of 
 common clay, it would be brittle and hollow 
 still, quite too perishable a vessel to imprison 
 all the needs, and too small to contain the sat- 
 isfaction of all the longings of the human soul. 
 They have not greatly succeeded, and they know 
 they never can, in this world; they have loved, 
 and what they most care for has had its sunset 
 out of their sky. The real desire of their souls 
 is, "O that I were a dove; then would I fly 
 away and be at rest," in a land very far off 
 which they hope for, of light and joy and peace, 
 the kingdom which is not of this world. 
 
 Yet there is a hope more spiritual than the 
 first of these, and more hopeful and manly than 
 the second. I may desire to see the world 
 better than it is, and may believe that it can 
 become so, yet not be satisfied with the mere 
 
82 Thy Kingdom Come. 
 
 bettering of its conditions on the earthly plane. 
 I may feel that there is an enlargement which 
 only God can give, yet not put it utterly be- 
 yond the horizon of the life that now is. " Some 
 indeed would say," if I may quote Mr. Maurice, 
 "that the source of this sense of beauty and 
 righteousness and truth is in themselves; if 
 men were but great and noble and free . . . they 
 would perceive it. Others affirm that when 
 they exalt themselves this secret is hidden from 
 them; that they enter into it only when they 
 are humbled. The first would say, not indeed 
 in a prayer, but in their professions, their daily 
 acts, their processes of self-discipline, 'My king- 
 dom come;' let my spirit be lightened of the 
 outward impediments which prevent it from 
 being right, wise, free; let it be lifted to its 
 proper throne, from which it may look upon all 
 beneath and around it, and if there be aught 
 above it, as its own possession. The other says, 
 'Thy kingdom come;' let the eyes of my un- 
 derstanding be cleared of their native mists, that 
 they may see thy wisdom ; let me be purged of 
 my inward pride and self-seeking, that I may 
 
Thy Kingdom Come. 83 
 
 know thy truth; let me be set free from my 
 exceeding sinfulness, that I may confess thy 
 righteousness and be clothed with it; And that 
 this may come to pass, do thou take the gov- 
 ernment of all that is within me, of conscience, 
 affection, reason, will, that they may do thy 
 work and not their own." 
 
 And now if we turn to him who gave us this 
 prayer, to Jesus, our Saviour, to know in which 
 of these interpretations of it our souls shall find 
 rest, he leaves us no room for doubt. It is the 
 largest possible, and it touches all lesser in- 
 terpretations with light and fulness. 
 
 The phrase "the kingdom of God," was, in 
 the day of Christ, the natural expression on 
 the lips of many of his countrymen of their 
 dearest longing ; but it was a very materialistic 
 kingdom which they prayed for. They saw 
 the hated foreigner exercising dominion over 
 them; they believed that the Messiah's king- 
 dom would be the rule of a prince of their 
 own blood, a second David, over an indepen- 
 dent nation, as God's vicegerent. Jesus took 
 the hope which he found there, purified and 
 
84 Thy Kingdom Come. 
 
 transfigured it, and gave it as an eternal pos- 
 session to mankind. He did not rebuke it or 
 contradict it; he ennobled it, and so made it 
 a hope great enough to answer all the unsat- 
 isfied longings of men's souls. The two classic 
 passages which define the Christian conception 
 of God's kingdom, out of a hundred or more in 
 the New Testament which speak of it, are cer- 
 tain words of Christ and of Saint Paul. When 
 some of the Pharisees asked Christ when the 
 kingdom of God should come, his answer was, 
 "The kingdom of God cometh not with obser- 
 vation ; neither shall they say, Lo here ! or Lo 
 there ! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within 
 you." And his great apostle says, writing to 
 the Eomans, "For the kingdom of God is not 
 meat and drink, but righteousness and peace 
 and joy in the Holy Ghost." That is to say, 
 the kingdom is, not merely shall be, by and 
 by, here or hereafter. It is an interior, spir- 
 itual kingdom, and no outward, material im- 
 provements in civilization can exhaust its 
 benefits for us. It is in those spiritual gifts 
 which are in their very nature powers ; and so 
 
Thy Kingdom Come. 85 
 
 it must be cumulative, — a richer treasure, a 
 larger blessing, a fuller kingdom, all the time. 
 
 I think there is nothing which we so much 
 need as this great and hopeful faith in the 
 present, ruling God. The imperfections of this 
 world, and of ourselves, are not difficult to 
 perceive. The fact that this world is in the 
 making, only, is plain enough to every one. 
 
 Men have always grasped, from the beginning, 
 this great fact; religious men have laid hold 
 upon it as giving a clue full of light and comfort 
 to the darkest mysteries of this human life; 
 and even those who could find no light or hope 
 in it have felt its power, like the iron stroke of a 
 flail beating on their hearts. The truth that the 
 Almighty Maker of our lives and Father of our 
 spirits has placed us here not as He might have 
 done, doubtless, with finished and symmetrical 
 lives, everything happy and smooth about us, 
 everything bright and easy within us, characters 
 complete and rounded, minds and hearts whose 
 even pulse-beat kept temperate time, the voices 
 of neighbors and friends making harmonious mu- 
 sic on our way, the business of our calling run- 
 
86 . Thy Kingdom Come. 
 
 ning with untangled threads, no shadow of dis- 
 ease, no dread of loss, no agony of parting ; but, 
 instead, in a world overhung with mystery and 
 filled with discipline, the machinery of life need- 
 ing constantly to be oiled and tended, and even 
 then getting out of running gear, the human re- 
 lations of it so complicated, so difficult, hardest 
 to do one's full duty in for those whose con- 
 science in duty is keenest, our own selves the 
 most unquiet kingdom for ourselves to rule, with 
 puzzles of heart and will and brain and con- 
 science, and over all the shadows which men 
 knew of old as the visi tings of Fate, and which, 
 though they know them now as the touch of a 
 merciful God, gathering the soul into the hollow 
 of His hand, they still must see in part as what 
 they are on their earthward side, — change and 
 sickness and pain and loss. The only solution is 
 the double truth : that God has not finished but 
 is still making His world; and that He does not 
 work in this alone, but calls for the co-operation 
 of man and nature with Him. 
 
 I do not need to linger to tell you how all the 
 study and modes of expression which belong 
 
Thy Kingdom Come. 87 
 
 specially to our time tend to emphasize these 
 truths on the side of the natural order. Blank 
 with denial only to those who will shut their 
 eyes, radiant with the progressive unfoldings of 
 the Divine Presence and Purpose, to the reverent 
 vision and the consecrated heart, how could any 
 new statement of the laws of Nature fail to be, 
 for those who believe that all those laws are only 
 the perfect working of the Perfect One ? And 
 the ever deepening sense that the world is one 
 ought surely to bring us more and more to the 
 faith that as He works in the universe without, 
 so He is working in the universe within, the 
 character, the life, the soul, with a steady un- 
 folding of His purpose, a progressive recreation 
 of that which He thought it well to make in the 
 beginning, that He might remake it continually, 
 from good to better, and from better to best. 
 
 And so, in very truth, we find it, when we 
 really try with reverent and careful hand to 
 unwrap the foldings which conceal from us the 
 meaning of our human life, and to get at the 
 heart of it. This is pre-eminently a case where 
 the evidence is cumulative. It grows larger, 
 
88 Thy Kingdom Come. 
 
 more convincing for every religious mind, the 
 more we look back upon our own past,- — the 
 broader the sweep with which we are able to 
 embrace and take in great pieces of that past 
 in one general survey. To the young Christian 
 who knows little by personal knowledge of the 
 things which make the burden and the weight of 
 life, the cares, the disappointments, the failures, 
 the sorrows, it must needs be that he takes them 
 on faith; the doctrine of God's method in the 
 life of men is of necessity to him a hearsay truth, 
 and not one which he has learned at first hand. 
 It is only when year after year has brought 
 its lengthening evidence to him that there is a 
 Power shaping his life beyond, and above, his 
 wisest plans for himself, how its earthly thwart- 
 ings have been Divine leadings, its desert ways 
 have led by unexpected fountains of Divine 
 water, and the very fragments into which its 
 strong mountains have been broken have been 
 as stones quarried for the walls of the New Jeru- 
 salem, — only then does the faith become an 
 assured conviction. 
 
 We all would agree, I suppose, in a more or 
 
Thy Kingdom Come. 89 
 
 less defined feeling that this principle holds 
 good in such cases as these where it has to do 
 with the working out of characters distinctly 
 religious, and where it manifests itself in the 
 graces which we recognize as Christian in form 
 as well as substance, which, as Jeremy Taylor 
 says, " take root downward in humility, and blos- 
 som upward in piety." But we can come far 
 outside of that boundary line which we thus ar- 
 bitrarily draw for ourselves, between the soul on 
 its spiritual side and the same soul in its de- 
 velopment of character, in relation to law and 
 duty. This is, indeed, where our Christianity 
 ought to help us, for it is exactly here that it 
 is vitally distinguished from other modes of 
 religion; it has a finer insight, and is armed 
 with a more potent instrument for discerning 
 the true scope of spiritual relations and the 
 real breadth of the spiritual universe. It is 
 somewhat like the process by which the spec- 
 trum of the sun's rays has recently been 
 explored to a reach far beyond its supposed 
 limits, and compelled to disclose mysteries 
 of wonder where there seemed to be nothing- 
 
90 Thy Kingdom Come. 
 
 ness. A keener eye, if I may say so, was in- 
 vented, which could pierce where human vision 
 stopped baffled, — and lo, where it seemed to be 
 pure darkness was full of the secrets of light ! 
 And so if we arm our moral and spiritual percep- 
 tion with the divine insight of Jesus Christ, we 
 can see how the moral spectrum, so to speak, 
 extends far beyond the limit which we might 
 suppose, which multitudes of men have sup- 
 posed, which great religious and historic faiths 
 have been willing to admit. The unerring lines 
 which tell the story of what it means, and of 
 its unity in the Divine Plan, can be read in 
 an unbroken sequence from the most intense 
 brightness of the religious life as it shines with 
 dazzling radiance and expresses itself most viv- 
 idly in great saints and spiritual heroes, all the 
 way through the shadowed silence in which re- 
 served characters, dumb to articulate expressive- 
 ness, are yet manifesting the same law of light 
 and truth. 
 
 Dr. Bartol says : " In a late French story, one 
 of the characters is an atheistic surgeon in a hos- 
 pital, where his niece, a young girl, is a devotee. 
 
Thy Kingdom Come. 91 
 
 He performs the bloody operations, she carries 
 round the ointment and lint. ' What,' she says 
 to him one day, ( do you hope for after death ? ' 
 'Kien, rien, rien/ he replied. Afterward, as 
 they make their circuit together, he informs 
 her he has a fatal disease which he knows will 
 shortly end his life, and asks if, on his send- 
 ing for her, she will come to see him at the 
 last. She assents. Soon his visits stop, and 
 his message entreating her presence arrives. 
 She finds the anteroom of his house filled 
 with the poor, grateful patients he had gratu- 
 itously relieved, and his chamber door barred 
 against the priest striving to enter in vain. 
 She is admitted alone, and at once falls, — 
 no, that is no human motion, — is thrown to 
 her knees at the bedside of the dying man. 
 '0 Lord/ she cries, 'bless him. Hast thou not 
 declared that thou wouldst bless those that 
 have fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited 
 the sick, and in prison? That is what he has 
 been doing all his life. Now, Lord, fulfil thy 
 promise and bless him.' The old man mur- 
 murs from his pillow, 'It is not necessary to 
 
92 Thy Kingdom Come. 
 
 overdo this. I have simply discharged my pro- 
 fessional duties, nothing more/ A pause of 
 silence between them ensues, interrupted by 
 the expiring man: 'Pray again, my child, pray 
 again. It is a music that pleases me/ " 
 
 Ah, friends, can there be any music so sweet 
 as the awakened sense that one has done some- 
 thing by faithfulness and unselfishness to bring 
 that kingdom nearer which "is not meat and 
 drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in 
 the Holy Ghost!" But it makes an immense 
 difference in the "lift" and inspiration of our 
 lives, whether our thought of it has the upward 
 or the downward look, whether we believe in it 
 as well as long for it. 
 
 Everything in which the world is moving 
 forward from good to better, from better to best, 
 is the coming of His kingdom on earth ; every 
 gain in spiritual life, in faith, in hope, in love, 
 every enlargement of the possibilities of charac- 
 ter, every opening of the windows of the soul, 
 is that kingdom made more real in individual 
 lives. It is in 'progress, not finished ; and so we 
 may well pray that it may come, and still that it 
 
Thy Kingdom Come. 93 
 
 may more fully come. It has begun to he here 
 already ; and so, above all else, we may well pray 
 in hope, assured that it has already been an- 
 swered and will be answered more and more. 
 
 This prayer means nothing less than that this 
 whole human society of which we are a part 
 may be transformed into the likeness of God, 
 — till there is not a life here so stunted or 
 so darkened or so defiled as not to be lifted 
 into His light, and made sweet and clean and 
 strong, — when " the kingdoms of this world 
 shall become the kingdom of our God and of 
 His Christ." 
 
 Is it not a noble vision ? is it not an inspiring 
 hope ? is it not worth praying for, both with that 
 yearning cry of our souls to God which will bring 
 His answer, and with that strenuous bending of 
 our lives to His service which is prayer making 
 itself real in act? 
 
 We can see, then, how the different modes of 
 looking at this thought of the coming of God's 
 kingdom are all touched by Christ. It is to be a 
 better world ; a happier and a richer in all good 
 things, a more wholesome home for His children 
 
94 Thy Kingdom Come. 
 
 to live in, — this world that now is ; and that is 
 a good gift, and it comes down from the Father 
 of lights Himself. But that is not all. There is 
 comfort here for the weary and heavy laden ; the 
 great hope which lays hold on the life immortal, 
 which knows that no life would be worth living 
 here on earth that was untouched by that myste- 
 rious and blessed light transfiguring all human 
 sorrow and desolations ; that no life would be 
 life hereafter in which those whom God gave us 
 here did not meet us again as His best gift to the 
 reawakened spirit ; this hope shall be fulfilled in 
 that eternity which is God's and where He is and 
 his children with Him. And the great desire of 
 the soul for those best gifts, the thirst for good- 
 ness, truth, holiness, which can only be satisfied 
 by the consciousness of being ruled by the Living 
 God, — the very coming of Christ was an answer 
 to the prayer ; it made real for men forever the 
 certainty of God's ruling care; it brought into 
 full being that interior kingdom of the willing, 
 loyal spirit, where God is enthroned. 
 
 " Thy kingdom come ! " We pray that prayer 
 often forgetting that it has been prayed before 
 
Thy Kingdom Come. 95 
 
 us, and to some purpose, for near two thousand 
 years. It is a wonderful thought that, from the 
 day when Christianity came to be at home in the 
 world, men have been asking for this, and surely 
 have not asked in vain. Even when their prayer 
 seemed to be denied, we can look back now and 
 see that it was answered in a higher, deeper way. 
 The early disciples prayed it, and instead of the 
 speedy reign of the Messiah, were dispersed over 
 the whole earth. But the gospel went with them, 
 as wind-wafted seed on the breath of a tempest. 
 Our Puritan forefathers prayed it in England, 
 and persecution smote them and drove them 
 forth, homeless fugitives. But they were "the 
 sifted wheat of the three kingdoms," and this 
 America is a diviner answer to their prayer than 
 they could have dreamed. But whether answered 
 in the fashion than it seemed to ask, or otherwise, 
 the whole progress of human history is an illu- 
 minated commentary upon it for hundreds of 
 years, and not alone within the pale of our relig- 
 ion but outside of it, wherever He hath not left 
 Himself without a witness. For there cannot be 
 any gleam of pity, any sense of tenderness, any 
 
96 Thy Kingdom Come. 
 
 light of faith in goodness or awe and trust, from 
 the earliest prayer of the savage to the sublime 
 surrender and joy of the Christian saint, in which 
 God has not been coming to His children. And 
 we, who are in the line of the Christian ages, as 
 we look back through sixty generations who have 
 prayed " Thy kingdom come," sometimes despon- 
 dently and sometimes jubilantly, we ought to 
 hear the answer as it has been given from gener- 
 ation to generation, as freedom has come, and 
 knowledge, the loosening of fetters from the body 
 and the mind and the soul of men. 
 
 Is there any prayer which comes, or ought to 
 come, closer into our own lives than this ? We 
 pray it every one of us here in the church, and 
 they who do not pray it elsewhere are poor in- 
 deed. What are we going to do about it ? Will 
 you try to help answer it ? For even our God 
 could not bring it to pass against the resistance 
 of our human wills. 
 
 Can we pray "Thy kingdom come," and then 
 go and thwart it by meanness in our business, by 
 churlishness in our prosperity, by bitter tempers 
 in our homes, by undevoutness in our religion, by 
 
 
Thy Kingdom Come. 97 
 
 impatience in our sorrows, by ungentle and un- 
 loving lives ? 
 
 Shall we not rather put ourselves in the cur- 
 rent in which the ages run, and all good and true 
 lives move, and where the help and strength 
 which never fail those who trust in them are 
 given, and say to our own souls, "Lift up 
 your heads, ye gates, and be ye lifted up, 
 ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory 
 shall come in " ? 
 
THY WILL BE DONE. 
 
V. 
 
 THY WILL BE DONE. 
 
 Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. — 
 Luke xi. 2. 
 
 HPHAT which every one likes best is to be 
 -*- able to say 2" will, — to exercise in our 
 own place and degree a sort of lesser omnipo- 
 tence, and to utter our fiat over creation, the 
 little world of our own. Fiat voluntas mea ! 
 Most of us start in the beginning with a more 
 or less clearly defined theory of this sort. And 
 yet a very slight experience of life teaches us 
 that if every one should act on this principle 
 we should have unhappy times, — that just as 
 far as the world has gone on that principle of 
 pure and unmixed selfishness " chaos has come 
 again." Here are a multitude of human wills, 
 imperfect, selfish, conflicting ; it is clearly im- 
 possible for any of us to have our own way to 
 any considerable extent. And further, around, 
 
102 Thy Will be Done. 
 
 beyond, above, beneath this little world of hu- 
 man lives is a tremendous universe of elements 
 and forces, in which this world is as it were an 
 atom floating in infinite space. 
 
 So it is that even those who pray it least 
 hopefully, or those who are not even hopeful 
 enough to pray it at all, see as plainly as any 
 one how great is the need that a higher will, 
 an omnipotent will, — the will of God, — should 
 control ours, and not ours only, but the whole 
 universe. Fiat voluntas tua ! 
 
 "Thy will be done." Probably no words in 
 the whole Bible are so often on the lips and 
 in the heart at the times when it really prays, 
 as these. There are none which contain such 
 a divine breathing of comfort for souls bruised 
 by the storms of life, or smitten by its sorrows. 
 They breathe, too, a trumpet-note, strenuous, in- 
 spiring, with a call to loftiest endeavor and a 
 promise of undoubted victory; nor are there 
 any words which embody such strength for 
 the brave spirits who are working for the tri- 
 umph of truth and justice, or who are struggling 
 in manly fashion against adverse fates and win- 
 
 
Thy Will be Done. 103 
 
 ning the victor's crown, even though it be, as 
 it not seldom is, by the martyr's cross. 
 
 Our Saviour well knew that the heart of hu- 
 manity needed such a prayer, — that we needed 
 above all things else to be able to see the hand 
 of God in the events of life, so unexpected, so 
 irresistible, and to trace them all, though through 
 labyrinthine windings, to a love and mercy we 
 could trust; yea, that we needed supremely to 
 lose our own poor will, with its almost purpose- 
 less attempts, its fickle wanderings, its uncer- 
 tain and irregular strivings after goodness, in 
 the blessed consciousness of that Divine will, 
 perfect though inscrutable, — which just because 
 it is inscrutable we are constrained to believe is 
 therefore perfect, — which shapes all these mo- 
 tions of its child's spirit into some harmonious 
 fulfilment of the Divine purpose ; that Divine 
 will, which to have faith in fills the breast with 
 light and peace. And because he knew this 
 well, Jesus taught his disciples to pray in these 
 words, which are the essence of Christian trust, 
 and which indeed are the essence of all prayer, 
 if we interpret them in their Christian breadth 
 
104 Thy Will be Done. 
 
 actively as well as passively. But although we 
 use them so much, ■ — perhaps, indeed, because 
 we use them so much, — there is danger of our 
 missing their full meaning. 
 
 When he who knew as no other the full mean- 
 ing in which God is the Euler, and His will the 
 law of all things, gave us this petition, he did 
 not by any means mean merely to repeat those 
 words which had just gone before, — "Thy name 
 be hallowed. Thy kingdom come." Eather does 
 this prayer that His will may be done complete 
 the rest. The name is God in Himself; "the 
 vrill imports energy going forth." God being 
 such an one as He is, infinite holiness, infinite 
 love, His purposes must be pure blessing. 
 
 Again, when we ask for the coming of His 
 kingdom, there is a wider compass in our prayer ; 
 we take in the whole world in our thought. But 
 now we draw nearer to ourselves. We try to 
 bring that power into our lives as it bears upon 
 those lives. " Thy will be done." It is not mere 
 omnipotence to which we pray. A being with- 
 out the moral attributes of Christianity might be 
 that, but the will would be one to dread. It is 
 
Thy Will be Done. 105 
 
 is far more than power that we worship; it is 
 the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 We need, then, to beware first of all of a 
 fatalistic way of viewing the connection ot 
 Providence with our earthly lives. There are 
 certain black moods of the mind which are most 
 likely to come upon us when some untoward 
 thing has thwarted the direction of our lives, 
 — a well-devised plan brought to nothing, a 
 cherished hope crushed ; or when all the powers 
 of evil seem to encamp around the soul like sav- 
 ages in the woods around a frontier fort, and to 
 be gradually but surely overcoming its resistance 
 to temptation. Then we may easily find our- 
 selves, weary and sick at heart, looking on the 
 world as a great machine with most complicated 
 mechanism, driven by the mighty engine of a 
 relentless destiny, that seems to be shutting us 
 up continually within narrower limits. In such 
 a mood we fold the hands with a feeling of de- 
 spair ; and though we say, " Thy will be done," 
 the voice within us seems rather to murmur, 
 with the writer of Ecclesiastes, " Time and 
 chance happeneth to them all." 
 
106 Thy Will be Done. 
 
 Yet I hardly need argue that this is a feel- 
 ing which we ought to resist with all the 
 strength of our souls, — morbid and weaken- 
 ing, if we yield to it till it becomes the 
 habitual state of the mind. Our forefathers 
 spent much strength in discussing the problem 
 of free will and predestination, — God's fore- 
 knowledge and determining purpose and man's 
 ability. Our generation is more practical, — 
 perhaps too little given to speculation on these 
 high themes; and I suppose it would be im- 
 possible to-day to find a Christian congrega- 
 tion which did not practically accept both 
 sides of the problem as equally facts, and 
 which did not leave the whole matter there. 
 But while we thus theoretically accept both, 
 we are by no means free, in our actual con- 
 duct of life, from the danger of yielding to a 
 practical fatalism which thinks it religious to 
 leave all to God exactly in those matters 
 where God and man must work together. 
 He utters the Lord's Prayer with no true com- 
 prehension of its meaning who makes it an 
 excuse to himself for supineness, and sits lazily 
 
Thy Will be Bone. 107 
 
 by as the various events of life rush swiftly- 
 past him, doing no more to direct their course 
 than the man who lives beside a rushing stream 
 can do to control it when the rains have de- 
 scended and the floods have come. 
 
 " Thy will be done ! " we say. But that it 
 may be done on earth, our hands and our 
 hearts are needed. 
 
 The candle of a misspent and wasted life goes 
 out in darkness ; has God's will been done if we 
 might have done something, and have failed to 
 do our part, to shelter it from the gusts of pas- 
 sion which it was too weak and flickering in 
 moral purpose to be able to resist ? 
 
 Some* great public wrong goes by default, and 
 we might at least have prevented it from going 
 by default, lifting a voice, even though it were 
 but a solitary voice, in protest ; can this mis- 
 erable conspiracy of universal silence be the 
 fulfilment of His will which is above all things 
 searching, active, powerful ? 
 
 And when we look within our own souls 
 do not reason and faith and plain common 
 sense (which, when touched with religion, is 
 
108 Thy Will be Done. 
 
 reason transfigured by faith), — do they not 
 all revolt at the idea that we can forget to 
 repent and reform, and then, forsooth, think it 
 enough to accept the consequences of our own 
 faults (which we ought never to have com- 
 mitted), and attribute it to the mysterious will 
 of God, whose holy will really was that we never 
 should commit them at all ? No ! we never were 
 taught to say, " Thy will be done," merely as an 
 easy way of shifting our own responsibility upon 
 Heaven; but in order that we might, as the 
 Apostle says, " gird up the loins of our mind " to 
 perform every duty religiously, and thus make 
 ourselves the instruments of God in the doing 
 of His holy and acceptable and perfect wilL 
 
 There is a less religious form of the same 
 fatalistic temper which we have been speaking 
 of. A great many persons say by the habit of 
 their mind, We will leave the small affairs, the 
 lesser matters of life, to take care of themselves ; 
 but when the great occasions come, those de- 
 cisive moments which call for the quick eye 
 and the swift purpose, we will find a worthy 
 opportunity for honesty and courage and gen- 
 
Thy Will he Done. 109 
 
 erosity. We can be mean, cruel, unfaithful, in 
 all the petty relations of human beings with 
 one another in which we are constantly in- 
 volved. These have no binding hold upon us, 
 to chain us in a leash of responsibility. Our 
 duty will only be exigent in some rare moment ; 
 and then we cannot help doing it when we see 
 it. Grant, for an instant, that this is so, and 
 you are as strong as you think you are. The 
 question at once arises, How are you to know 
 the golden moment when it comes ? Do you 
 expect the will of your God to stand before 
 you transfigured, as an angel? The eyes that 
 are bleared with closely gazing on our own 
 self-interest will hardly be able with their short- 
 sighted vision to distinguish the majesty of this 
 great opportunity which you have seen in your 
 dreams with a halo. I suppose that even those 
 whom the religious painters represent with a 
 shining aureole about their heads walked this 
 dusty earth as common men and women, and 
 the careless passer saw in Peter or Paul only a 
 fisherman casting his nets and a tent-maker 
 plying his needle. 
 
110 Thy Will be Done. 
 
 Or the very nearness of the opportunity will 
 deceive you, and you will not realize how much 
 . it means. A mountain, when one stands at its 
 base, dwarfs itself and seems no larger than the 
 neighboring foot-hills. Or, once more, this oc- 
 casion for doing some great thing may be very 
 small in itself, made significant only by stand- 
 ing just in that place in the chain of similar 
 events. As I rode with my friends in the far 
 western part of Montana, through the heart of 
 the Eocky Mountains, we paused to drink of a 
 brook that gurgled across the high, broken plain, 
 so level that it was impossible to realize that it 
 was the dividing ridge of the continent. The rill 
 was like any other ; yet as the waters of the 
 little stream parted at the spot where we stood, 
 flowing toward the east and toward the west, 
 they diverged never to meet again. You could 
 turn the water in either direction by dropping 
 a pebble in it, by putting your hand across it. 
 But once turned it would never cease its course 
 until it joined the Mississippi and flowed to the 
 Gulf of Mexico, or till it was merged with the 
 waters of the Columbia in the Pacific Ocean. 
 
Thy Will be Done. Ill 
 
 Or, suppose we know the opportunity when 
 it conies ; shall we be better fitted for it then, 
 because we have not been preparing for it now ? 
 Does the neglect of small duties prepare us to 
 perform great ones ? The man who thinks that 
 his arm will be developed of itself to the mus- 
 cular power which can perform feats of strength, 
 while it lies idle without lifting a finger in the 
 hundred petty occasions of every day, will find 
 it nerveless when the supreme moment of trial 
 comes. Why should we expect any more that 
 the moral and spiritual strength which we need 
 in the exigent moments of our trial or our duty 
 will come of itself, or be acquired without steady 
 exercise ? 
 
 No. It is very plain that the prayer, "Thy 
 will be done," is only uttered in its true spirit 
 when neither the mistaken theory that the om- 
 nipotence of God dwarfs man to impotence, nor 
 the careless neglect of small duties as being of 
 no account, prevents ns from trying loyally to 
 do our part in bringing to pass that perfect 
 will "on earth," in the little planet which we 
 rule, "as it is done in heaven," in the vast 
 
112 Thy Will he Done. 
 
 sweep of the Divine government through the 
 countless ranges, height beyond height, which 
 are above our human reach or knowledge. 
 
 But can we, then, learn what this will is ? 
 For obviously, if we cannot, doing it with any 
 free, active, intelligent service would be impos- 
 sible ; and even hearing it would be but a grim 
 setting the face as a flint against pitiless des- 
 tiny. And surely here only those would doubt 
 that in the Bible we can come deep and far 
 into the purposes of God for His children who 
 have not made acquaintance with that exhaust- 
 less fountain. Whatever else men have drawn 
 out of it, — doctrine, controversy, theory, — how- 
 ever they have made it an armory of texts, they 
 have never gone to it for a practical and prac- 
 ticable rule of life without finding there what 
 they sought. Even the ancient Scriptures of 
 the Old Testament are so saturated with the 
 presence of a God of Eighteousness, leading and 
 teaching His children, that though the religion 
 is progressive, and therefore in its earlier de- 
 grees imperfect, it points forward, so that even 
 that strange old custom of opening its pages at 
 
Thy Will be Done. 113 
 
 hazard for a guiding word was likelier to give 
 help than the modern way of leaving it un- 
 turned at all. 
 
 But we are not left to the Old Testament, 
 we have the word of Christ; we have those 
 writings of his first disciples on which the new 
 world of Christian faith and trust was framed 
 together. If any man wants to find a bridge 
 with which he can span the mighty gulf which 
 parts the seen from the unseen, — this human 
 life from the great will of God, — let him try 
 it with some sentence from the Sermon on the. 
 Mount, as one of the Beatitudes, or with some 
 strong saying of Saint Paul; let him honestly 
 try to build his life on that. He will find that 
 he can trust his life safely to it. 
 
 "What are your marching orders, sir?" said 
 the Duke of Wellington to a clergyman who 
 was discussing a point of duty with him. 
 " What are your marching orders ? " 
 
 The old soldier's instinct was a sound one. 
 Here is the Book which records how saints and 
 heroes have been led on to victory, which gives 
 their rule of life and the secret of their power, 
 
 8 
 
114 Thy Will be Done. 
 
 and shows the dangers of the way and sounds 
 with their note of triumph. 
 
 Nor here alone is His will shown to us, but 
 in all right and good things. What else are 
 the voices of conscience, the call of duty, the 
 joy of self-sacrifice, the blessing found in ser- 
 vice ? What else is the law written in light 
 on all creation, and shining luminous in all 
 true, faithful lives? The will of God! We 
 must be blind if we cannot see it in all these, 
 — a will which is clone, not simply borne, and 
 which can be done actively, glad]y, trustfully. 
 There is nothing, then, that a man does, which 
 is a fit occupation for a human being to be en- 
 gaged in at all, in which this prayer may not 
 act itself out in the life. 
 
 Here is a lawyer, we will say. Has he a right 
 to keep his desire that the will of God may 
 prevail for Sundays, or for the time when some 
 great trouble comes upon him ? Are there not 
 a hundred ways, quite within the scope of his 
 regular professional duties, in which he can put 
 it into effect if he will? Is the Golden Eule 
 anything else than that prayer applied to the 
 
Thy Will be Done. 115 
 
 living of human beings in the same world 
 together ? Any of us who have been so for- 
 tunate as to know in a country town some 
 wise, just lawyer of the old school, could tell 
 very well — and the opportunity is not less 
 large, perhaps, though not wholly the same, in 
 our complex city life — how many occasions 
 there are in which such an one can reconcile 
 instead of fomenting discord; when he can ad- 
 vise to mercy instead of the pitiless exaction 
 of claims which crush the poor; when he can 
 carry through justice to its victory and prevent 
 the triumph of the brazen offender. 
 
 Here is a business man; has it no concern 
 in his business? His object is to make a for- 
 tune. Be it so. But the pursuit of this in 
 all earnest, honest, honorable ways, is not in- 
 compatible with many ways of serving God as 
 he goes along. For every man exerts an in- 
 fluence on society, of whose extent, perhaps, 
 he little dreams. He will never know in this 
 world how a petty meanness (for we do not 
 speak here of acts absolutely dishonest) will give 
 his neighbor courage to go one step beyond 
 
116 Thy Will be Done. 
 
 him. A man may even be unaware himself 
 if his influence is a debasing one; just as he 
 may breathe the atmosphere of a close room 
 over and over again till it is heavy with the 
 poison of the carbonic acid which he has 
 breathed out, and yet himself hardly be con- 
 scious that its life is exhausted. So he may 
 take away from the moral atmosphere all its 
 vitality, filling it instead with impurities which 
 insensibly stifle the moral sense and weaken 
 the will and make drowsy the conscience of 
 all who come within his sphere. 
 
 Or he may be high-minded, bringing the 
 honor of chivalry into his business, scorning 
 an unfair advantage of the ignorance of others, 
 full of the charities w^hich sweeten life, and 
 transfiguring every action by a pure heart, a 
 good conscience, and faith unfeigned ; and the 
 influence of a spirit so radiant and inspiring 
 will penetrate like light, — as a sunbeam 
 strikes through a dusty room and makes its 
 path only brighter by the very motes that 
 float in the air. 
 
 Here is your home ! What is it if the spirit 
 
Thy Will be Done. 117 
 
 of this prayer is forgotten? I know nothing 
 sadder than the sight of parents without any de- 
 fined principle of religious loyalty, living from 
 day to day as if their children had no future, 
 and there was no need of making them feel the 
 reality of God's presence or of training them as 
 immortal beings for the life beyond this life, — 
 as if Christ had never been here and touched 
 every soul with an eternal glory. Here are chil- 
 dren with dormant powers of holiness and good- 
 ness, needing only the warmth of a sympathetic 
 religious atmosphere to quicken their best na- 
 ture into life. But the precious moments pass 
 ungarnered. And then, when it is too late, 
 and the character is set into its fixed mould, 
 — hardened, it may be, against entreaty or ex- 
 ample, —too often it is regarded by those who 
 had these momentous responsibilities as part 
 of the plan of Providence, something to bow 
 before in submission as the inscrutable will of 
 God. 
 
 When we look thus into the depths of God's 
 holy will through this prayer, we find that its 
 attitude is not of resignation only, but of the 
 
118 Thy Will he Done. 
 
 eager human will asking to find its happiness in 
 doing something with God and for God. The 
 great vineyard in which the Master calls us 
 all to labor is seen to be no far-off vision on 
 the sunny slopes of Palestine, made beautiful 
 by the misty haze of distance, to be dreamed 
 about by idlers in the market-place, but to lie 
 at our very feet and to furnish work enough 
 for our hand. I can easily see how such a 
 consciousness of being a fellow-worker with 
 God ought to raise a man to a higher level 
 of spiritual feeling. It would touch his business 
 and his home with a certain strong and tender 
 light, in which conscience and love would be 
 blended. His soul would be, as it were, a per- 
 fect glass to focus the rays of the Divine will 
 as they shine through the clear atmosphere of 
 a human spirit in harmony with its Father's 
 Spirit ; it would make them shine with kindly 
 warmth on the poor, the desolate, because they 
 first penetrated the inmost places of that soul 
 itself with radiancy. 
 
 I thank God that I have been privileged to 
 know not a few such souls, truly and bravely 
 
Thy Will be Done. 119 
 
 Christian, whose whole life was a continual 
 progress in goodness and holiness, — manly, 
 womanly, with large natures, thoroughly hu- 
 man, lovable and beautiful on all the sides 
 which we touch on the common levels, but ris- 
 ing to heights of character and going down to 
 depths of trust which makes them moral and 
 spiritual powers; not always endowed with re- 
 markable gifts of genius or of culture, but sim- 
 ply earnest and faithful, evidently mastered and 
 swayed by a profound allegiance to God: — 
 
 tt Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers, 
 Whose loves in higher love endure. 
 "What souls possess themselves so pure ? 
 Or is there blessedness like theirs ? " 
 
 We know well the other side of this prayer, 
 the side which speaks with blanched lips of 
 resignation and submission. Yet because men 
 pray thus when they are powerless to avert 
 what is sent to them, because every human 
 heart must experience that sense of solitude and 
 suffering, it would be a grievous mistake for us 
 to think of this only as the passive side of this 
 great prayer. No human being can submit in 
 
120 Thy Will he Done. 
 
 the uttermost stress of life's great calamities 
 without using all the forces which God has 
 put into our souls, and all the help which it 
 can draw from His deep succors. When the 
 soul tastes the bitter cup which was pressed 
 to the lips of Christ in Gethsemane, we need 
 to know that it is not only God's will, but His 
 loving will. You have come beyond the sphere 
 of any active doing of your own; you lie en- 
 tirely in God's great hand; the spirit of resig- 
 nation is plainly your necessity if you would 
 have peace, your duty if you are a child of 
 God. And where our necessity is also our 
 duty it is plain that no mere passivity will 
 serve our turn. A mighty resolve must be at 
 the heart of our prayer, — the resolve to climb 
 toward the light. 
 
 So comes the compensation. For as in a 
 mountain valley where the winter's snow re- 
 mains longest on the ground rare flowers blos- 
 som, which cannot bear the warmer soil of a 
 more genial climate, so in those high hidden 
 solitudes to which the soul struggles up amid 
 the Alpine loneliness where it is in the secret 
 
Thy Will be Done. 121 
 
 chambers of the Most High, it finds "celestial 
 blooms " which wither in the sunshine of a softer, 
 brighter world. There is a heavenly-minded- 
 ness which it is hard to make a part of the 
 very fibre of the soul, unless we have sought 
 in the Lord's high places His peace that passeth 
 understanding. There is a faith which is ri- 
 pened by trial and pain, and makes us see 
 through the mystery one thing at least in the 
 darkness, — the great hand of God leading the 
 soul from earth to heaven. 
 
 Many are those solitudes of the human soul. 
 Hardest is it when it is the disappointment 
 which comes through folly and sin. There is 
 a point, even there, where those who are closest 
 bound by ties of kindred or affection have done 
 what they can, and can do no more. What 
 shall we say when the mother . sees her son 
 sinking in the mire which his own sinful feet 
 have trampled, wounding, all unregardful, the 
 tenderest feelings of the hearts that love and 
 can do nothing ? It is not weakness, but the 
 divinest fortitude which teaches such a spirit 
 to say, "Thy will be done," and in trusting 
 
122 Thy Will be Done. 
 
 that inscrutable wisdom to find some balm for 
 its mortal aches. 
 
 Or when all is gone but the precious mem- 
 ories which fill the past with light, and the 
 priceless hopes whose light never goes down, it 
 is not a weak sinking of the soul, but the strong- 
 est powers of our nature upborne and filled by 
 the Spirit of God, which make confidence in 
 the Divine mercy, and gratitude for all that has 
 been, and faith in all that shall be, rise within 
 the soul and silence the murmurs of the troubled 
 stream of life against its stony bed, as the ris- 
 ing tide of the ocean stills the noisy waters of 
 each creek and inlet which it fills. 
 
 There is room enough for submission, then, 
 in the world, and in this prayer. Yet you can- 
 not have even submission without something 
 more ; and in the prayer " Thy will be done " 
 there is always a call to help in doing it, and 
 a faith that it will surely be perfectly done at 
 last, since it is the will of One who cannot 
 fail. 
 
 "As in heaven so in earth," it says. And 
 all the shining order of the sublime procession 
 
Thy Will be Done. 123 
 
 of obedience with which the stars in their orbits, 
 and the company of angels and archangels and 
 saints and holy ones go, as we believe, singing 
 on their way to fulfil His tasks, bids us believe 
 that we can do something to make this earth 
 a heaven. 
 
OUR DAILY BREAD. 
 
VI. 
 
 OUK DAILY BREAD. 
 
 Give us this day our daily bread. — Matt. vi. 11. 
 
 "\T7E have felt, I think, as we have gone on 
 * * together meditating on the successive 
 clauses of our Lord's great prayer that it was 
 more full of teaching, of doctrine in the true 
 meaning of the word, than we had supposed. 
 And now as we come to the first petition which 
 touches our personal wants, there is a lesson for 
 us in the very place which this link holds in this 
 golden chain which binds His asking children to 
 the throne of God. This is the first word in 
 which we speak of our own needs. We have 
 approached our God not merely in the attitude 
 of suppliants before an omnipotent Monarch, 
 but as children coming to their Father ; we have 
 prayed that His Name may be hallowed; that 
 men may know Him in His perfect attributes 
 and may worthily honor Him; that His king- 
 
128 Our Daily Bread. 
 
 dom, which is over all, may more and more pre- 
 vail; that His perfect will may be done, not 
 simply borne, with free, willing service, every- 
 where as it is by the blessed ones in heaven. 
 All this has taken you away from yourself, if you 
 have really prayed it ; it has filled the universe 
 for you with God, nay, has not filled it, but has 
 opened your eyes to see His fulness in it, who 
 filleth all things. It seems as if Christ said to 
 us, Wait, before you venture to ask for yourself. 
 At the threshold of the Temple, lay aside all 
 selfish thoughts, and try to make your own soul 
 a living temple ; when you have done that, you 
 can trust yourself to approach the altar and ask 
 your gift from it. 
 
 In a sermon from this text, preached on the 
 first Sunday of Lent, Mr. Maurice has dwelt on 
 the thought that in the Gospel which we shall 
 read next Sunday our Saviour gives us a com- 
 mentary upon this petition. The tempter said to 
 Jesus, "If thou be the Son of God, command 
 that these stones be made bread." He answered, 
 " It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, 
 but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
 
Our Daily Bread. 129 
 
 mouth of God." That is to say, the one supreme 
 need in regard to these matters which seem most 
 wndivine, the common things of our daily need, 
 is that we should have the habit of dependence 
 and faith. It is the truth which was symbolized 
 by the pot of manna laid up in the ark of the 
 Holy of Holies, a memorial of God's feeding 
 His people in the Israelite wandering. And in 
 the life of our Master this truth shines bright. 
 
 It is the lesson which ought to be the cen- 
 tral thought of those commemorative forty days 
 of Lent. So far as it is not a mere formal 
 matter, so far as it is made a period of spirit- 
 ual quietness and the gathering up of the soul's 
 forces for renewal in religious strength, every 
 soul must be the better for pausing to confront 
 the great thought till we can make it wholly 
 ours, that the things which most seem ours are 
 primarily not ours, but God's, and ours by His 
 grace. " Give us this day our daily bread." 
 
 Are we then to pray for material gifts ? So it 
 would appear, if we are to hearken to Christ. 
 And if for bread, that is, the common things which 
 we require to keep body and soul together, then 
 
 9 
 
130 Our Daily Bread. 
 
 for how many of the needs of body and spirit 
 which widen out from that elemental point ! 
 Suppose for a moment that he had left these 
 things altogether out of the account in summing 
 up the things that we could rightly pray for, 
 would you not feel that it was less well thus to 
 lose the Christian consecration on the whole ma- 
 terial side of life, that you could not pray for the 
 things without which you could not live this 
 earthly life at all, that when you draw near to 
 God, you must leave them outside your thought 
 of Him, outside the thought of His Power or His 
 Care ? However you might be able to do this in 
 the hour of your speculative questioning on this 
 matter, you could not do it in the times when the 
 deep places of your spirit were broken up, when 
 you felt that you were compassed about with 
 awe and mystery, and the finger of God touched 
 you. 
 
 My friends, the deep need of man is the 
 best interpreter of the deep purposes of God. 
 The cry that comes out of the heart of the na- 
 ture which He has made testifies truly to the 
 heart of His own nature; it testifies that it is 
 
Our Daily Bread. 131 
 
 not a cry into dark emptiness, but into the 
 darkness where God is, the answering God. 
 
 As we proceed farther and farther into the 
 depth of this prayer, it seems to me that each 
 sentence speaks more and more directly to the 
 special need of our time. Our modern world 
 is divided by the sharp exigencies of its ear- 
 nest competitions, its keen business rivalries, 
 the hurry and drive and fever of our life, into 
 two opposite classes of people, — those who 
 overwork, and those who do not work at all, 
 or as little as they can; those who carry their 
 own burdens and everybody's else, and those 
 who are carried. Both need to draw near to 
 Christ, to learn how the habit of their life, the 
 desire of their souls, should be related to God. 
 Stop long enough, the Master says to the man 
 who w r akes to a new crowded day of business 
 care, and hastens from his home with hardly 
 a greeting to his family, and with no leisure 
 for a morning blessing on the day, — stop long 
 enough to think that God is the Giver of all, 
 the Source of the opportunity that waits for you 
 to seize it, of the trained powers and gifts (we 
 
132 Our Daily Bread. 
 
 call them so) which you will put forth to get 
 your gains, and so the free, lavish Giver to you 
 American of this nineteenth century of those 
 very things which it is the fashion of our na- 
 tion and our age to plume ourselves upon as 
 most distinctly our own. The time must come 
 to every one of us when we shall know that 
 nothing is oar own, and that we hang on the 
 great hand of God for the ebbing pulses of this 
 life itself. Surely it will be well if we will 
 anticipate a little that attitude of humility and 
 waiting on our unseen Helper. We shall be 
 less likely to be grasping and greedy, more in- 
 clined to be just, and generous too, if we keep 
 this thought of the overflowing treasury of God's 
 free benefits for us before our minds, thinking 
 riot so much of the sternness of His laws and the 
 rigor of His demands upon us, as of His good- 
 ness and His grace. This on the one side ; and 
 on the other, for the lazy and the do-little mem- 
 bers of the social order, there is a bracing tonic 
 in this very petition of dependence. " Give us," 
 we say ; but how does He give ? Not by the 
 falling of the bread upon us through the air, but 
 
Our Daily Bread. 133 
 
 through the long process of sowing and reap- 
 ing, nature and man working together, the grain 
 which was a few scattered seeds is harvested at 
 last ; and then again follow yet other processes 
 in which man's labor and the laws of chemical 
 action work together. So, however your bread 
 comes to you, you have no right to ask that it 
 shall come without your working for it. God 
 gives it to you by giving you a chance to get 
 it, faculties that you can train to labor, a place 
 in this world that you can find waiting for you 
 to fill it, plenty of opportunity for hardness and 
 persistency and fidelity. And so the ancient 
 curse in the garden of Eden in the beginning, 
 " In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat 
 bread," is turned to blessing in the new life 
 of Christendom. 
 
 But the prayer is only for this day. Again, 
 how strange a contrast to the temper of our 
 anxious, foreboding way of life, which is con- 
 tinually borrowing from to-morrow care to cloud 
 the happiest present ! Are we to say, then, that 
 Christ really taught that we were to live as if 
 there were no morrow, with spendthrift lavish- 
 
134 Our Daily Bread. 
 
 ness beggaring our future, or with indolent ac- 
 quiescence leaving it unguarded ? Did he mean 
 that we were so to consider the fowls of the air 
 and the lilies of the field ? The question is its 
 own answer. We interpret Christ by Christ; 
 and in the spirit of his religion, and in other 
 words of his, we find the meaning, and in our 
 own lives abundantly the wisdom of his warnings 
 against that feverish worry and strain, that rush 
 after wealth at any price, those discontents and 
 repinings which spoil the sweetness and mar the 
 peace of so many. There are few of us who 
 would not be helped if they could be met to- 
 morrow in their hurry down town by one who 
 would say to them, " A little more living by the 
 day in the wise quiet of a sober mind would 
 not hurt you, my friend. Try, for to-day, to 
 possess your soul in patience. You have this 
 day to live in. Put all the life into it you can, 
 of goodness and love and trust." 
 
 " Give us this day our daily bread." I sup- 
 pose there is no single sentence in the Bible or 
 in all literature more in contrast with the aver- 
 age habit of mind of the average man of our 
 
 
Our Daily Bread. 135 
 
 time. Daily bread ! is that what he is striving 
 for, slaving for, wearing out his life to get ? It 
 does not in any wise follow that it would not 
 do him good to try honestly to tone down his 
 desires to this bounded limit. One thing is 
 certain, — the richest man in America really 
 gets for his wages only his food and clothes 
 and a roof over his head. If he wins real 
 respect, it is because his character justifies it; 
 if he has intellectual tastes or pleasures to en- 
 rich his life, his money does not buy them. 
 And if we would school ourselves to ask for 
 daily tread, meaning a more sober limit on 
 our hot ambitions, our race after money, our 
 temptations to luxurious life, we should bring 
 whole new horizons of light into our spirits. 
 
 Yes ! bread is a plain word, but a wholesome 
 one. A little more of that plainness in our 
 thought and our desire would help to scatter 
 the phantoms of social discontent which lower 
 in our sky, — all the brood which hover like 
 pestilential vapors over the fertile plain of this 
 modern world. Not that Christ means to re- 
 duce the world to one level, and discourage 
 
136 Our Daily Bread. 
 
 provision for the future. Whatever you receive 
 more than your daily bread is so much super- 
 added. The more there is, the more duty does 
 it bring with it to the mind which is touched 
 by his light. More than we need is much; if 
 you have it, use it as a faithful steward. But 
 what we need is soon said, though it is never- 
 theless a great gift, — our daily bread. Hav- 
 ing this, says an apostle, "let us be therewith 
 content." 
 
FORGIVENESS.— THE DIVINE SIDE. 
 
VII. 
 
 I. FORGIVENESS. — THE DIVINE SIDE, 
 
 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. — 
 Matt. vi. 12. 
 
 TT7*E should agree, I suppose, with Mr. Mau- 
 * * rice, that we should be sorry to lose the 
 word " trespasses " which we use in our ordinary 
 repetition of the Lord's Prayer. And yet an- 
 other great teacher of our time is surely right 
 when in his " Letters to the Clergy on the Lord's 
 Prayer and the Church," he says : — 
 
 "There is one very simple lesson, needed espe- 
 cially by people in circumstances of happy life, which 
 I have never heard fully enforced from the pulpit, 
 and which is usually the more lost sight of, because 
 the fine and inaccurate word ' trespasses ? is so often 
 used instead of the simple and accurate one ' debts.' 
 Among people well educated and happily circum- 
 stanced, it may easily chance that long periods of 
 their lives pass without any such conscious sin as 
 could, on any discovery or memory of it, make them 
 
140 Forgiveness. — The Divine Side, 
 
 cry out, in truth and in pain, 6 I have sinned against 
 the Lord.' But scarcely an hour of their happy days 
 can pass over them without leaving, were their hearts 
 open, some evidence written there that they have 
 'left undone the things that they ought to have 
 done,' and giving them bitterer and heavier cause to 
 cry and cry again, forever, in the pure words of their 
 Master's prayer, ' Dimitte nobis debita nostra/ " 
 
 The nature and the needs of man seem in 
 many ways to be contradicted by external nature, 
 and so here. 
 
 There is no forgiveness in the laws of nature. 
 Immutable and pitiless, they work on with an 
 unsympathizing perfectness of which the most 
 faultless piece of human machinery is but a 
 blundering imitation. No ignorance or inno- 
 cence of the child prevents the fire from burning 
 his hand when thrust into it. The avalanche feels 
 the thrill of the traveller's cautious step stirring 
 the slumbering snows on the upper Alps, and 
 hurls its ruin down upon him. The winds and 
 waters do not forgive the sailor who comes on a 
 lee shore in a raging northeaster, but freeze him 
 with the bitter ice that stiffens the shrouds, and 
 
Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 141 
 
 rush at him with the white-tusked billows, and 
 smite him against the cruel rocks. The laws of 
 chemistry and physics are as sure as the mathe- 
 matics ; and acids never turn to alkalies, nor do 
 projectiles drop half-way from the gun, for our 
 convenience. The laws of nature never forgive. 
 
 What is history, but the proof of the unfor- 
 giving sequence of cause and effect ? 
 
 Hence arose the idea of Fate. Men felt the 
 iron laws constraining them, deaf to their cries, 
 ordaining their lot of loss and pain, crushing 
 them, while still the sunshine laughed and the 
 skies were blue above them and Nature disre- 
 garded their calamity though their hearts should 
 break. The austere and antique genius of Michael 
 Angelo has caught the spirit of the old fable, in 
 his picture of the Parcse, where the three with- 
 ered crones who spin and sever the thread of 
 human life, sit in aged majesty of mien, and look 
 forth from the canvas with stony, unsympathiz- 
 ing eyes on the humanity whose destinies they 
 shape, but do not share. Fate was something 
 higher and more powerful than the gods of Olym- 
 pus, a dread power behind that of Jove himself. 
 
142 Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 
 
 And the sombre imagination of our Norse an- 
 cestors expressed the same thought in the myth 
 that Odin himself must die at length, and his 
 stormy Valhalla sink into the night of a Destiny 
 darkening over all. And this Destiny was un- 
 forgiving. No prayers could change, no suffer- 
 ings soften it. Its penalties must be "paid to 
 the uttermost farthing." 
 
 And yet, side by side with an iron fatalism 
 has gasped for life the human sense of need. 
 Men have felt the need of forgiveness, and 
 their longing has cried out even to the heavens 
 which they believed deaf, in all manner of ut- 
 tered and inarticulate petitions. Their sins 
 and their sorrows were stronger than all their 
 theories of destiny ; and, as so often, the warmth 
 of the heart has melted the icy logic of the 
 head. 
 
 It is therefore one of the most interest- 
 ing of all questions which concern the relations 
 between man and God, — what the nature of 
 Divine forgiveness is, and how we are to 
 believe in it. There are three ways, and 
 only three, of answering the question ; two of 
 
Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 143 
 
 them in one form or other as old as the ques- 
 tioning mind itself, and the other the Christian 
 solution. 
 
 1. The first is that which we have already- 
 spoken of as drawn from the observation of 
 the material facts of things. It says simply, 
 "There is no such thing as forgiveness, at all. 
 It is all a dream of human nature, which is 
 always desiring the impossible and striving to 
 reach the unattainable." 
 
 It turns its telescope to the furthest depths 
 of the celestial spaces, and finds there only 
 order and law; it peers with microscope into 
 the finest dust of matter, and can discern no 
 forgiveness there; and so far as it can read the 
 laws of human nature and human society, it 
 sees only cause and effect at work, — the cause 
 unattainable, the effect unchangeable. And so 
 it bids us cease our useless efforts to change the 
 course of our fates ; the only worthy prayer is 
 a life conformed to the laws, the only escape 
 from the penalties is to bear them. This view 
 has great strength in our experimental age, the 
 strength of harmony with the new facts which 
 
144 Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 
 
 are fascinating us all, and which seem almost 
 to lift the curtain from the hidden secrets of 
 creation, the strength of consistency with itself, 
 and of the simplicity which seems to explain 
 everything by grasping the central thought of 
 all. But it is as weak as it is strong ; for it is 
 liable to the criticism that it breaks its own 
 law, and theorizes beyond the legitimate proof 
 of its facts. Its facts are material; God is spir- 
 itual; and it is incompetent to interpret spirit 
 by matter. Its facts are partial, because they 
 do not cover the whole domain of fact, and leave 
 out of cognizance the facts of the human soul, 
 whose longings and prayers are just as real as 
 a fossil in the stone or a planet in its orbit. 
 And it is difficult to see wherein the fatalism 
 of a theory which eliminates a free God from 
 His universe and from all connection with His 
 children is the gainer over the most rigid fa- 
 talism of the Calvinism which puts men in 
 the chains of predestination and foreordination. 
 That at least preserves for men the living will 
 of a personal God, and a chance that some of 
 them may find a pitying ear in their prayers. 
 
Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 145 
 
 2. And yet the arbitrary theory of forgive- 
 ness contains dreadful inconsistencies. This is 
 the idea of a school of theology which has had 
 great and most hurtful influence in Christian 
 teaching. By a most unjust misinterpretation 
 of the letter of Saint Paul's epistles, the noble 
 apostle has been made out the main pillar in 
 a horrid system which is as foreign to the gospel 
 of free grace which he offers as to his own royal 
 nature. But the words of Jesus can never be 
 even forced into a support for this theology, 
 which combines the logic of the head with the 
 atheism of the heart, The essential thing in it 
 is the sovereignty of God. As if God could 
 ever be so sovereign as to go against His own 
 perfect nature! God is able to do all things, 
 excepting to contradict Himself. But the moral 
 law, though it must bind Him, does not limit 
 Him, because it is He, — not an outside con- 
 straint upon Him, but a part of Him. But the 
 arbitrary theory of forgiveness asserts that the 
 moral law is only of force with men, — that we 
 cannot reason from it to the dealings of God. 
 (As if this did not also cut away the ground 
 
 10 
 
146 Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 
 
 from beneath our own moral conduct as well !) 
 It asserts that God forgives some men solely 
 because He arbitrarily chooses, not in any way 
 because it is in His nature so to do. So it 
 contrives expedients for winning the forgiveness 
 which rests on only one condition in reality. 
 It forges elaborately wrought keys of dogmatic 
 creeds to open the kingdom of heaven with; 
 but they are too intricate for the simple wards, 
 which can be unlocked with the plain key of 
 love and trust. It takes the dear name of Christ 
 as a substitute instead of a succor in our saving, 
 and really makes God solely a ruler whose 
 sentence is to be escaped, instead of a loving 
 Father. 
 
 3. The only theory of the Divine forgiveness 
 which will hold in face of the New Testament, 
 or of a true idea of the nature of God as drawn 
 from that of man, or of the moral law, or of the 
 needs of our own souls, is that which makes 
 forgiveness a part of God's fatherhood. His all- 
 embracing love is the only thing which will 
 break the stony silence of nature's unforgiving 
 laws, or solve the riddles in which human in- 
 
Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 147 
 
 genuity has involved the free grace of God. 
 If I have never cared for my child it is prob- 
 ably a mystery to me to see a mother's tender- 
 ness with the fractious complainings of her in- 
 fant. A restless, fretful creature, why does he 
 not make her as miserable as himself? It is 
 just that the mother-heart overflows in a tide 
 large enough to drown her own discomfort, and 
 to float the very resistance and rebellion of her 
 child. Does God make the spirit of the woman 
 larger than His own ? Was not the love in 
 Him before it was in her ? "As one whom his 
 mother comforteth, so will I comfort you, saith 
 the Lord." Or what shall we make of the good 
 tidings which is by Jesus Christ ? His gospel 
 is that God loves us, that He " loved us before 
 we loved Him." And all his precepts are links 
 in that golden chain which binds earth to heaven. 
 And his life is the transparent medium through 
 which the loving-kindness of God shines. If 
 God's forgiving love be not true, we must change 
 the definition of love altogether. His forgive- 
 ness is not shut up in the narrow limit of our 
 own thought of Him, not bought for you or 
 
148 Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 
 
 me and not for another. It is wider than the 
 heavens and deeper than the sea, and takes in 
 all His children. And man's offences cannot 
 take him out of God's care and love. 
 
 But, it is said, this doctrine diminishes the 
 evil of sin. Not so, excepting in so far as it 
 diminishes the quantity of sin by saving men 
 from its power. For the Divine forgiveness does 
 not ignore or make light of the fact of sin. It 
 rests first of all upon a condition on the human 
 side, — the plain condition of sincere repentance. 
 We cannot receive forgiveness until we wish to 
 take it. And repentance is not an idle mood of 
 the mind ; it is a disposition going down to the 
 very depths of the soul and " dividing the joints 
 from the marrow," — as profound as the evil we 
 have done. Till we have that, though God is 
 forgiving, yet are we not forgiven, any more 
 than a man with bandaged eyes can walk by 
 daylight, though the sun pours its flood of day 
 around him. 
 
 But, it is said, this is a dangerous condition 
 on which to give so great a gift. Dangerous 
 the principle may be for application to human 
 
Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 149 
 
 governments, but precisely because they are hu- 
 man. They cannot test the genuineness of the 
 repentance. Bat God can read the heart, and 
 knows with unerring certainty the reality of the 
 reformation. The forgiveness of men is at any 
 rate one-sided and partial, colored with their 
 own imperfections, affected by fancy and whim, 
 by prejudice and interest. The forgiveness of 
 God is the pure white ray of light from His 
 own throne. And there is a forgiveness by men 
 which does not even have any moral value what- 
 soever, — that " social condonation " which lets 
 offences go simply because it cannot be at the 
 trouble of remembering them. A keen critic of 
 human nature has observed how unfair this is : 
 " The best justice of the world is served out 
 in very rude earthen vessels." For example, 
 i{ Fraud in a merchant or a lawyer is a much 
 more serious mischief than want of veracity in 
 a soldier. But not so does society punish." It 
 has an arbitrary standard of rewards and pun- 
 ishments of its own. Now there is no " con- 
 doning " in the heavenly forgiveness, because 
 there is no imperfection in God. He does not 
 
150 Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 
 
 forgive by overlooking the offences of His chil- 
 dren, but by looking through and through them 
 with a loving-kindness and tender mercy which 
 can see the first dawn of repentance and can 
 chasten even sinners " as sons." It is be- 
 cause there is no hiding of our inmost souls 
 from God that we are sure that " He is faith- 
 ful and just to forgive us our sins and to 
 cleanse us from all unrighteousness." 
 
 And here comes in the reconciling work of 
 Jesus Christ. The primary point of that w^ork 
 consists in disclosing the Divine love. To 
 reveal God is to reconcile men. This is the 
 atoning work of the Saviour, — bringing at one 
 our human hearts and the Father by "showing 
 us the Father." He who read the penitent 
 spirit of the poor sinful woman who washed 
 his feet with her tears, and whom the pub- 
 licans and sinners rose up to call blessed, — 
 he makes the tender pity of our God a visible 
 fact, which cannot be blurred or winked away, 
 and shows how perfect justice and perfect love 
 can be reconciled. This is the side of Christ's 
 work which it concerns us to know. 
 
Forgiveness. — The Divine Side a 151 
 
 Besides, the Christian doctrine is that God is 
 not an impassible God. He hears His children 
 when they cry to Him ; He pities them when 
 they suffer; and though He wrap Himself in 
 silence and darkness, He is still their Father. 
 To forgive is in the essence of this infinite 
 Being; it is a part of His full happiness. A 
 Jewish parable in the Talmud relates that when 
 God was about to create man, His different at- 
 tributes pleaded with Him. " Create him not/' 
 said Truth, " for he will sin against Thy law of 
 truth continually." " Create him not," said Jus- 
 tice ; " for he will only deserve Thy condemna- 
 tion." " Create him not," said Peace ; " for he 
 will bring discord and ruin everywhere." " Cre- 
 ate him, O Father," said Mercy; "for he will 
 give opportunity to show Thy mercy." 
 
 But it may be asked how this doctrine of the 
 Divine forgiveness affects the fact of punish- 
 ment ? It does not affect the fact, it affects the 
 aspect of it. The penalty of sin is still need- 
 ful, but it is not a vindictive penalty. It is 
 wrapped up in every sin as surely as the har- 
 vest sleeps in the seed. But it is chastening 
 
152 Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 
 
 and remedial. As the child must feel the 
 scorch of flame to learn to dread it, so the soul 
 learns from the hurt of sin to fear sin itself. 
 But when I learn from the Gospel that God 
 is still my forgiving Father, the sting of my 
 suffering is gone. Though the soul should go 
 scarred by it through all eternity, it may in 
 its very crippled state lean more closely upon 
 God. And thus the truth of future punish- 
 ment and the truth of future salvation are rec- 
 onciled. "He shall save His people," says the 
 Scripture, not from the consequences of their 
 sins, but "from their sins'' His forgiveness 
 will lift us out of the settled despair of evil 
 habits, above the enslaving bondage of some 
 passion or weakness which has enthralled the 
 whole nature; and though we remember it and 
 go on bruised and faint from its thraldom, we 
 are transplanted into new conditions. Now 
 there is hope and life. 
 
 A favorite school of thought in our own day 
 meets this position by denying the fundamental 
 truth which lies at its basis. It is claimed by 
 some that there is really no alienation between 
 
Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 153 
 
 man and God. The idea of sin is a dyspeptic 
 phantom, and is to be banished by following 
 out the impulses of our human nature. Well, 
 that experiment was pretty thoroughly tried in 
 the dark and sinful centuries before the Christian 
 helps were known to men. The fact about human 
 nature is simply that while, on the one hand, 
 it is not "totally depraved," on the other it is 
 not totally divine. It is a very mixed thing, 
 and because mixed it needs the harmonizing 
 power of the spirit of God. Chaos contained a 
 great many good elements, but they needed the 
 breath of that Spirit moving " upon the waters." 
 But, it is said, we will bear the punishment 
 of our sins, if we have any, without flinching. 
 It would be the part of a coward to do the 
 wrong and refuse to pay its price. Yes ! bear 
 it, — no fear but there will be enough to bear. 
 But the question is not whether you shall bear 
 it, but how you shall bear it. You may have 
 sinned, but you are still a child of God. Do 
 not you wish to be reconciled, to feel that even 
 your wrong does not stand between you and 
 your Father's love? 
 
154 Forgiveness, — The Divine Side. 
 
 The sense of our need of that is deeper in 
 the human heart than any philosophical theory. 
 That church which has taken the wants of the 
 soul and made even a false answer to them its 
 tower of strength, has recognized this in its doc- 
 trine of absolution. The Protestant enters the 
 vast pile of St. Peter's with admiration and 
 wonder, yet does not feel in all its splendor the 
 solemn presence which he seeks till he stands 
 beneath the soaring dome and looks round on 
 the circle of confessionals inscribed each with 
 the name of a different language, inviting wan- 
 derers from many lands to lay their burdens 
 down. Then he feels that it is a faint and ma- 
 terial type of the refuge which God offers ev- 
 erywhere and always to His children. For 
 everywhere under the blue dome of the infinite 
 heavens the door of confession is open to His 
 children. No human ear need come between 
 to hear the prayer, no human voice to utter 
 the pardon. It only needs a seeking heart. 
 
 The doctrine of God's forgiveness lies at the 
 root of the religious life. 
 
 1. It gives a ground for hope, because it gives 
 
Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 155 
 
 an opportunity to start anew, feeling that the 
 future is not mortgaged beyond remedy to our 
 error-laden past. 
 
 2. It gives a ground for faith, because it re- 
 veals to us a God whom we can trust and 
 love. It makes repentance a stepping-stone to 
 truer living, and prayer a real cry to one who 
 really answers. 
 
 3. It takes hold on life itself, to make it 
 divine by breathing into it the same spirit of 
 forgiving love. Men have learned this hardest 
 of all the graces by trying to imitate God. 
 This is the spirit which glowed in the Chris- 
 tian martyrs. John Huber, a distinguished 
 Huguenot galley-slave, has recorded the follow- 
 ing experience : — 
 
 " We arrived one night at a little town, chained, 
 my wife and my children with fourteen galley 
 slaves. The priests came to us, offering freedom 
 on condition that we abjured. We agreed to pre- 
 serve a profound silence. After them came the 
 women and children of the place, who covered us 
 with mud. I made my little party fall on their 
 knees, and we put up this prayer in which all the 
 fugitives joined: ' Gracious God, who seest the 
 
156 Forgiveness. — The Divine Side. 
 
 wrongs to which we are hourly exposed, give us 
 strength to support them, and to forgive in charity 
 those who wrong us. Strengthen us from good 
 even unto better.'" 1 
 
 "From good even unto better." This is the 
 aspiration of the human soul. And from better 
 unto lest we still look up adoring at the per- 
 fect fulness of forgiving love which is in the 
 bosom of our Heavenly Father. When the 
 Pharisees heard Jesus, they said, "Who is this, 
 that forgiveth sins also ? " But all men since 
 have recognized in this very thing the sure 
 evidence that he is the Son of God. And so 
 far as we are touched with his spirit, we shall 
 rise into his likeness, and " forgive, as we also 
 are forgiven." 
 
 1 Smiles's Huguenots. 
 
FORGIVENESS.— THE HUMAN SIDE. 
 
VIII. 
 
 II. F0KG1VENESS. — THE HUMAN SIDE. 
 
 Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. — 
 Matt. vi. 12. 
 
 Then came Peter to him and said, Lord, how oft 
 shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him ? 
 till seven times ? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto 
 thee, until seven times : but, until seventy times seven* 
 Matt, xviii. 21, 22. 
 
 'T^HE apostle who was to be entrusted with 
 *■ the keeping of the keys of the kingdom 
 of- heaven probably thought that he had gone 
 to the outermost verge of the requirement of 
 Christ, when he spoke of seven times as the 
 limit required. And certainly that was more 
 than seven times as many as the natural im- 
 pulse of the human heart requires. But Peter 
 was like one who having launched upon a bay, 
 land-locked and limited, finds himself borne on 
 by the sweep of a vast tide that feels the pulse 
 of the ocean, rising and falling on the waves of 
 
160 Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 
 
 mightier waters, contained only by the blue in- 
 finitude above and the blue infinitude below, 
 and by the edge of the round world. So far 
 does the doctrine of forgiveness, as taught by 
 Christ, open out beyond any narrow idea of it. 
 I believe it to be a just statement, that this 
 doctrine of forgiveness is a distinctively Chris- 
 tian truth, — one of the characteristic features 
 of the Gospel. The Hebrews had glimmers and 
 gleams of it; within limits and under defini- 
 tions, it was not unknown to the purest ethical 
 and religious systems of antiquity; but for- 
 giveness with the Christian reach and for the 
 Christian reasons belongs in the Christian re- 
 ligion alone. Simply because it seems unat- 
 tainable, except to those who have the light 
 of Jesus Christ to see it by, and the help of 
 Jesus Christ to reach it by. On the plane 
 of our average life, to forgive an enemy or 
 an injury seems out of our sphere. But if 
 there be any practical duty enforced by Christ 
 and his apostles, it is this strange, plain, hard 
 duty, to forgive. Over and over again, as if 
 they feared lest it should be forgotten, they 
 
Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 161 
 
 return to it, in epistle and gospel, bidding us 
 "forgive one another, even as God for Christ's 
 sake hath forgiven us," or telling us earnest par- 
 ables, like that of "the unmerciful servant," or 
 making us in the Lord's Prayer ask God Him- 
 self that His forgiveness of us may be as our 
 forgiveness of "them that trespass against us." 
 And here it is noteworthy that this part of the 
 Lord's Prayer is the only part which Christ 
 thinks it needful to explain, as Saint Augustine 
 points out, Probably because he recognizes that 
 it is so hard for us, and that we need every 
 strength that can be given us, he says, "For if 
 ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will 
 your heavenly Father forgive you your tres- 
 passes." The only way to make a hard duty 
 easy is to bring God into it; and the harder 
 it is, the closer must the thought of Him be 
 interwoven with it. 
 
 And I say again the spirit of forgiveness is 
 hard to attain. Por consider how great and 
 utter a virtue of soul it is. In its true mean- 
 ing forgiving is the giving away of an offence ; 
 and the Greek has the same idea even more 
 
 n 
 
162 Forgiveness, — The Human Side. 
 
 delicately expressed; it is the sending away of 
 a thing, that is, the making it to disappear 
 from between two persons. Some offence has 
 risen between man and man; it stands like an 
 ugly incarnation of evil in the way of their 
 seeing each other; they cannot look round it 
 or through it; they cannot speak naturally to 
 each other across its black shadow. Now it is 
 not a light matter, to be brought about with a 
 word, or in some momentary amiable mood 
 when the world goes particularly well with us, 
 to exorcise this enemy of our peace, to send it 
 utterly away from between us two, so that the 
 sunshine can fall broad and free between us 
 again, and kindly human fellowship can grasp 
 hands across the closed-up gulf. Yet that, and 
 no less than that, is perfect forgiveness. Oh, it 
 is hard to do it; harder than to pray, for the 
 soul cannot help melting sometimes at the 
 thought of God's goodness, and then it speaks 
 to Him as its Father; harder than to do justly, 
 for there is an instinctive desire in men to " do 
 what is about right" as the phrase is, and this 
 is not far from doing what is quite right. But 
 
Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 163 
 
 to forgive, to silence the tingling blood which 
 mounts at insult or injustice, and still to keep 
 the spirit of human love and of Divine pity 
 closer to our hearts than our offence, this re- 
 quires the heroism of self-conquest. For a 
 wrong is a most obstinate thing: it will not 
 " down " at our bidding. " Only by prayer and 
 fasting goeth out this kind of devil/' by the 
 prayerful temper of a holy mind, by the fasting 
 of a perfect subduing of self. 
 
 Now this difficulty is not felt by untamed 
 human nature. On the contrary, the savage 
 has no ethical idea more deeply engraven on 
 his barbarous code of morals than the notion 
 that revenge is good in and for itself. No 
 duty is more sacred to him than that of re- 
 paying his enemy to the uttermost. The wild 
 man of the prairie counts his foe's life no 
 too great price for a stolen beast. Nay, the 
 frontiersman, who perhaps was sprinkled with 
 Christian baptism in some quiet New Eng- 
 land village, takes kindly to the ways of the 
 savage and forgets that there is "a more ex- 
 cellent way." What is much of the so-called 
 
164 Forgiveness. — TJne Human Side. 
 
 "code of honor" but the relics of the barba- 
 rian that lurks under the painted garb of civil- 
 ization ? Even nations which call themselves 
 Christian can often find no better method of 
 giving or taking reparation for one injury than 
 by inflicting another, and must write their 
 treaties of peace in bloody letters, to be read 
 by the flames of burning cities, and uttered 
 from the throats of volleying cannon. Beligion, 
 in its primary stage, so far from banishing 
 this notion of revenge, intensified it, and had 
 altars to Hate and prayers for Vengeance. 
 And it was reserved for Jesus Christ to pro- 
 claim the repeal of the law which Moses had 
 given in the highest and purest religion of 
 antiquity, not because it was perfect, but "be- 
 cause of the hardness of the Jews' hearts/' — 
 "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." 
 
 In all this there was at least a very intense 
 earnestness. It was a fixed and clear moral 
 law of society which defined forgiveness by 
 leaving no place for it in the recognized sys- 
 tem of life and duty. Modern civilized man- 
 ners have refined many things (though how 
 
Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 165 
 
 far they have changed their essential nature, 
 is another question) ; and so here. They 
 have made it one of the proprieties of life to 
 forgive our enemies and our injuries in general, 
 although when it comes to particular instances 
 the case is very different. In these days a 
 malignant hostility, even for a cause, is re- 
 garded, if made too public, as a breach of the 
 social decencies, and men sometimes consider 
 this a great proof of the world's advance 
 toward perfection. But I apprehend that the 
 only thing which it surely proves is, that the 
 temper of civilized man is less fiery than in 
 a simpler state. The volcano loses its molten 
 glow whose fierceness will liquefy the very 
 rocks; but it hardens into solid lava and is 
 covered by an ashy crust. And so the habits 
 of men may have grown cooler, but less im- 
 pressible to good as well as evil, and covered 
 with the ashes of an indifference which is nigh 
 akin to deadness of the mind. 
 
 Whatever may be said of the progress of 
 the human race, I apprehend that no one can 
 deny that civilization, considered as a power 
 
166 Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 
 
 in humanity apart from religion, tends rather 
 to increase the spirit of selfish indifference in 
 the individual than to excite any glow of self- 
 sacrifice. And so there is a forgiveness which 
 is no true forgiveness, but is simply an easy 
 temper, letting things go because it is the 
 least troublesome way. It is only a shallow 
 cure for a very deep-seated evil of spirit, thus 
 to suppose that a state of mind can take care 
 of itself; and it is to be feared that we often 
 please ourselves with ourselves very mistaken- 
 ly, giving ourselves much credit for what is 
 really mere laziness of feeling, forgiving that 
 we may not be at the pains of keeping a 
 grudge (and it is the most expensive thing 
 that we can keep). Said the keen La Eoche- 
 foucauld: " Eeconciliation with our enemies is 
 only a desire to render our condition better, a 
 weariness of war and a fear of some evil event." 
 Or we use that idle proverb about " forgiving 
 and forgetting," as if by not thinking about a 
 grievance it would wear itself away with time. 
 But time cannot regenerate the soul, and it is 
 there that the spirit of forgiveness must be 
 
Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 167 
 
 found, the spirit which will not merely forget, 
 that is, let a thing slip away into the back- 
 ground of our memory, only to start forth 
 again when it can annoy us most, but will 
 forgive, that is, send away and banish utterly 
 that which frets us. 
 
 But these delusive counterfeits of the Chris- 
 tian virtue of forgiveness, though wanting in any 
 moral value, are harmless in comparison with 
 the hypocrisy which sets out at the same time 
 to reap the religious benefit of forgiving the sin 
 against us and to preserve its unrelenting gripe 
 upon the sinner. One of those hard, grasping 
 natures who are sometimes born into the world 
 lay a-dying, after an unlovely life. The little 
 religion which he had, had come to him not as 
 the sunlight comes to a fair prospect, to kindle 
 upon it a yet fairer beauty, but as it shines on 
 a barren stone, to bring out all its wrinkled 
 stoniness. So the hypocritical religion which he 
 professed had seemed only to give a new excuse 
 for all the perverseness which was in him. He 
 was dying, and he knew it, and sent for his 
 minister, to make sure of his passport yonder. 
 
168 Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 
 
 But the clergyman was a faithful man, and 
 knew the weak places in his spiritual patient's 
 character, and told him that he must forgive 
 his enemies as he himself hoped to be forgiven. 
 He called to him his son : " Well, I must for- 
 give such an one ; but my curse be upon you 
 if you do." There is something near to blas- 
 phemy in it yet we may well press home to 
 ourselves the question if it is not after all too 
 much after our own inclination to forgive with 
 the lips or outwardly, while we cherish and 
 nurse an undying grudge in the heart; yes, 
 and feel in our hearts a sort of pride in so 
 doing as a manly and spirited act. 
 
 The true forgiveness must be a part of the 
 very temper of the soul itself; not merely a 
 word or act, but a disposition. It is a Chris- 
 tian virtue, because it belongs to the Christian- 
 ized soul. There are virtues which belong on 
 the natural plane, for example, courage, fidelity, 
 truth; there are others which belong on the 
 supernatural plane, that is, which are a part 
 of the soul that has come into conscious re- 
 lations to God, and is lifted by the Divine 
 
Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 169 
 
 strength above its unassisted powers. . Then 
 man rises out of the limitations which have 
 constrained him on the heavenward side, and 
 hopes, as one whose horizon is bounded only 
 by the sky, and loves, as seeing the immortal 
 in the mortal, and forgives, because he is capa- 
 ble of self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness. 
 
 But do I then seem to be urging an unat- 
 tainable or mysterious virtue ? Perhaps some 
 of the difficulties which beset the practical ap- 
 plication of this virtue will diminish if we pause 
 here to ask exactly what it is which we are 
 called on at one time or another in life to for- 
 give. That which in a general principle of con- 
 duct appears too high for our reach, is often 
 made more easy in its special applications. 
 
 The grievances which annoy us may be clas- 
 sified under three heads : — 
 
 1. There are the offences against our conven- 
 ience. In a world so complicated as this in 
 which we live, and where we jostle so closely 
 against one another, it would be strange if all 
 went exactly to suit us, since, we were not con- 
 sulted in the putting of society together, and 
 
170 Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 
 
 we are not the only persons concerned in it. 
 Notwithstanding, a large part of the troubles of 
 mankind arise from a failure to make allow- 
 ance for this self-evident fact. 
 
 But the want of tolerance goes much beyond 
 this, and touches inconveniences which are 
 merely of the whim or fancy. You do not 
 like the tone of a man's voice, the shape of his 
 figure, the manner in which he manages his 
 own affairs. And why should you ? All these 
 are his, not yours. Notwithstanding, many of 
 the best people in the world take their friends' 
 peculiarities so much to heart that they can 
 hardly keep on good terms with them, and find 
 it hard to forgive Providence for making them 
 so at all. Nor is this a light matter for laughter 
 only ; it really hinders much of the free joy of 
 life, and raises a multitude of petty hurts to a 
 serious dignity, as a swarm of summer insects, 
 which singly are brushed aside disregarding, in 
 the mass sting and goad to distraction. 
 
 2. But the troubles are much deeper which 
 arise from offences against our rights. For 
 these aggrieve not only our comfort, but our 
 
Forgiveness.- — The Human Side. 171 
 
 pride. Still it is not, necessarily, that a wrong 
 has been done us knowingly; it is only that 
 we had a larger claim than is allowed. Hence 
 grow most of the quarrels that embitter life. 
 
 It is almost safe to say that no fault can be 
 only on one side ; and if we would try in any 
 matter first to find where the blame lies at our 
 door, we should often stop on the threshold of 
 that, and never get beyond it. Besides, who 
 shall measure the amount of offences against 
 our rights which simply arise from false expec- 
 tations, from demanding of the world more con- 
 sideration, or more pay, than fairly belongs to 
 us, or than we are willing to bestow ? But set 
 the case at its worst, that one has been injured 
 in what is justly his; still, to nurse the injury 
 is only putting it out to interest. It were bet- 
 ter to forgive, if any one could do it for so 
 mean a reason, and to wipe out the annoyance 
 with the remembrance. But the more common 
 way is to defend doubtful rights of one's own 
 by trespassing on the undoubted rights of oth- 
 ers, and to get reparation after the manner of 
 two kings who go to war about a barren corner 
 
172 Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 
 
 of territory, at a cost of men enough to people 
 it and treasure enough to buy it ten times 
 over. 
 
 3. Yet another kind of annoyance, which is 
 yet near akin to this, is from offences against 
 God's requirements through us; that is, we con- 
 stitute ourselves representatives of the Divine 
 authority, and try to find an act of rebellion 
 against that in every breach of our privilege. 
 Like the Oriental monarchs whose names are 
 so sacred that they cannot be spoken on pain 
 of death, we wrap the cloak of sacredness 
 round our personality, and identify our own 
 welfare with the eternal laws, which may not 
 be transgressed. To trespass against us is to 
 commit treason against Heaven. And so there 
 are some men who wage a kind of religious 
 war against mankind, serenely confident that 
 they are vindicating the Divine justice in their 
 own wrongs. It must be said, too, that some- 
 times the very interest in a great moral ques- 
 tion will lead to an identification of one's self 
 with the neglected truth or cause, which pro* 
 duces an amazing bitterness of personal feeling. 
 
Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 173 
 
 To separate the sure from the uncertain truth, 
 to weigh other men's motives fairly, to allow 
 for differences of judgment, requires a breadth 
 and calmness of vision not easy to attain. 
 And there is no intensity of unforgivingness 
 so utter as when one would blast not a sin 
 alone, but the sinner with the fires of Heaven's 
 wrath. "When John Huss was at the stake to 
 be burnt, his eye fixed upon a poor, plain 
 country fellow, whom he observed to be busier 
 than the rest, and to run oftener to fetch more 
 and more fagots to burn him ; and he said 
 thereupon no more but this, sancta sim- 
 plicitas." Burnings and hangings, inquisitions 
 and crusades, religious scandals and ecclesias- 
 tical schisms, have all grown out of this feel- 
 ing of personal responsibility for the Divine jus- 
 tice. Have you never heard it said, "I cannot 
 forgive such or such a moral attitude toward 
 some great principle" ? But are you asked to for- 
 give it, or to make it your own matter at all ? 
 Surely, if you make sure that your own heart 
 is thoroughly in sympathy with God's truth, you 
 can trust God Himself to take care of the rest. 
 
174 Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 
 
 Now it is not difficult to admit that of all 
 these kinds of injury it should really be no 
 hard thing to forgive, (a) offences against our 
 convenience, because we have no pre-eminent 
 right in the matter; (b) offences against our 
 rights, because we have a right in the matter, 
 and can therefore afford to be magnanimous ; 
 (c) offences against God, because we need all 
 our strength to keep ourselves in God's ways 
 and must not spend it in wrath against those 
 who have wandered from them. But we have 
 not yet touched the really difficult point in 
 the question of forgiveness. It is put in a word. 
 Can we forgive an act of moral turpitude? Is 
 it possible to wipe out the memory of a wrong 
 which has been done us, in which there was 
 meanness, or double-dealing, or dishonor? I 
 answer, No. The Christian gospel does not con- 
 fuse the lines between right and wrong ; it ren- 
 ders them sharp and clear ; it does not enjoin a 
 weak, easy good-nature, which can be imposed 
 upon indefinitely, but moral insight. If your 
 friend has really betrayed his trust, or has 
 been fair-spoken to your face and a foe to 
 
Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 175 
 
 your back, you know that there is falsehood in 
 him ; you cannot any more treat him as a true 
 man, if you are yourself true. But you must 
 make sure, and trebly sure, that you do not do 
 him wrong. Eemember that it is the hardest 
 matter to judge motives. Suppose, for example, 
 that one has spoken cruelly of you. It may be 
 for the good of a cause in whose way you seem 
 to him to be standing ; it may be a fair condem- 
 nation of your own doubtful conduct. " Faithful 
 are the wounds of a friend," says the Scripture I 
 and criticism, even when it seems harsh and 
 unfair, will often have a wholesome lesson for 
 us. But if it be indeed the worst that can 
 happen, and you are betrayed, and the seeming 
 friendship is a lie, — what then? Manifestly, 
 the friendship is dead ; bury it out of your 
 sight ; yet bury it tenderly, for the sake of the 
 love and honor which you once believed were 
 in it, But you can still forgive, so far as your 
 own heart is concerned, and send the wrong 
 away from you. The lurong you can banish 
 from between you. The penalty of the wrong 
 must remain, — your friend has lost you. Yet 
 
176 Forgiveness, — The Human Side. 
 
 even there may there be a resurrection of that 
 which seemed buried forever, if the sin is 
 washed out by the tears of repentance. As has 
 been said, "The offender must send the wrong 
 away, as well as the offended.' , Yet we need 
 not wait for that ; we can banish the bitterness 
 and lose the sense of personal wrong in grief 
 for the fault of an erring soul. 
 
 "A person told F. Eavignan that he had been 
 calumniated by a false friend. 'It is certainly 
 a great affliction/ answered the father, with an 
 expression of the tenderest compassion ; ( but is 
 there not something better within you, to forget 
 and to pardon ? Eaise yourself by prayer to 
 this higher level of faith, and then be happy 
 and go in peace.' The counsel was adopted and 
 peace restored." 1 
 
 This is the Christian spirit, which does not 
 count grievances, but rises above them, and tries 
 to see life as God sees it, and can "suffer, yet 
 be strong." 
 
 We should find it easier, as well as nobler, 
 to cultivate the spirit of forgiveness of real 
 
 1 Life of F. Eavignan, p. 392. 
 
Forgiveness. — -The Human Side. 177 
 
 wrongs, when such there be that we suffer, if 
 we tried to put ourselves more in the place of 
 the other person. For then you would find that 
 whatever you suffer is really far outweighed by 
 the loss which he suffers. He may not know 
 it, or may be only dimly conscious of the murky 
 atmosphere in his own heart; but, none the less, 
 no man can do another a wilful wrong without 
 infinite hurt in his own soul. You would pity 
 your worst enemy and try to help him, if you 
 saw him in bodily peril. Will you not pity if 
 you see him on fire with anger, or seeking to 
 cheat you and perhaps succeeding, and if he 
 succeeds doomed to carry with him, until he re- 
 pents, the burden of a mean and fraudulent act, 
 and a conscience which will plague him if awake, 
 and if asleep is ten times more to be pitied. 
 
 Yield to this pity when it stirs within your 
 heart, and you are safe. For then the very 
 dew from heaven descends on your own soul, 
 and instead of being a dry and thirsty land, 
 where no water is, it will be full of living 
 springs. It is God Himself stirring in your 
 spirit, helping your prayer for the forgiveness 
 
 12 
 
178 Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 
 
 which you know you need from Him, every 
 day you live, for sins of omission and of com- 
 mission, — -answering that prayer by the very 
 fact that you are put in a mood to pray it. 
 
 " If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there 
 rememberest that thy brother hath aught against 
 thee, leave there thy gift before the altar ; first 
 be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and 
 offer thy gift," said our Master. 
 
 And how much more potent are the induce- 
 ments which are on us thus to forgive than the 
 force of any wrong can be ! 
 
 For we ourselves have lived, and having tasted 
 life we know how hard it is not to sin against 
 one's neighbor. Experience should teach us tol- 
 erance. In these paths where it is so easy to 
 stumble, so difficult to walk with sure and steady 
 step, we should rather learn to reach out a help- 
 ing hand to a brother than to push him further 
 if he fall. Says Marcus Aurelius : " It is right 
 that man should love those who have offended 
 him. He will do so when he remembers that 
 all men are his relations, and that it is through 
 ignorance and involuntarily that they sin, — and 
 
Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 179 
 
 then we all die so soon." He died sixteen cen- 
 turies ago, but the golden thought lives to 
 teach us charity. The sense of human frailty- 
 should prevent us from crowding this little 
 span of life with hates and discords that leave 
 no room for serener thoughts. 
 
 And shall we wait for that time of silence 
 to forgive when we can do no otherwise ? Not 
 alone the sense of mortality, but the trust in 
 immortality would bid us rise now to the height 
 of a forgiving spirit. For we are compounded 
 not alone of dust, but of a divine spirit, and 
 this earthly life is a part of the heavenly. We 
 should therefore see in things which vex us 
 their divine element, — "a soul of goodness in 
 things evil." "We should learn to trust cheer- 
 fully in human nature, in that nature which 
 God has given to us all as a power for strength 
 and good. Old Michael Feneberg, in his school, 
 "reconciled two boys who would not speak to 
 each other by setting them down to their por- 
 ridge with only one spoon between them." 
 Somewhat so are we all set down to a common 
 work and calling here together, too close in 
 
180 Forgiveness.- — The Human Side. 
 
 brotherhood and fellowship to permit any grudge 
 to come between us. 
 
 Nay, not alone on the side of human fel- 
 lowship, but on the side of God's loving-kind- 
 ness, does the principle of forgiveness come to 
 us. For the strong sense of God's love for us 
 should melt our hearts into a fervor of love 
 which can see His children in all men, and feel 
 His pardon moving us to pardon. 
 
 Forgiveness is the duty of sinners. In the 
 presence of the perfect justice which we have 
 offended, and the absolute purity before which 
 the very angels bow themselves to the dust and 
 cry, "Unclean, unclean/' knowing that we too 
 deserve to suffer, humility should teach us a 
 long-suffering charity. "He that cannot for- 
 give others," says Lord Herbert, "breaks the 
 bridge over which he must pass himself; for 
 every man has need to be forgiven." 
 
 Forgiveness is the obedience of disciples. For 
 it is in the law of Jesus Christ that we should 
 forgive our enemies, and pray for those who 
 despitefully use us, and return good for evil. 
 
 Forgiveness is the privilege of God's children. 
 
Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 181 
 
 It is a gift whose exercise is the sign and pledge 
 of our divinity, of the victory of His loving 
 spirit in our hearts. Said Martin Boos : " People 
 think it a weakness to forgive an insult. Then 
 God would be the weakest in heaven and on 
 earth; for no one in heaven or earth forgives 
 so much as He." Where His children are made 
 in His spiritual likeness, they can " forgive seven 
 times or seventy times seven ;" for it is not a 
 question of arithmetic, but a question of grace. 
 A duty, an obedience, a privilege, we can for- 
 give from fear, from law, or from love. And 
 "love is the fulfilling of the law," and " perfect 
 love casteth out fear." 
 
 We can see why it is that the world is so 
 strangely full of occasions for forgiveness, and 
 the frequent need of this virtue is ever upon 
 us. It is because God seeks to educate us in 
 those qualities which are like Himself. Out of 
 the very vexations and perplexities of life best 
 spring the self-denial, the love, whose home is 
 in the bosom of God. Not sufficient is that 
 answer which a deaf and dumb person wrote 
 with his pencil to the question, " What is your 
 
182 Forgiveness. — The Human Side. 
 
 idea of forgiveness ? " " It is the odor which 
 flowers yield when trampled on." It is more 
 than passive submission; it is actively rising 
 superior, and the fragrance which it yields is 
 not the perfume of a crushed nature, but the 
 bloom and beauty of a strong and victorious 
 soul. 
 
 But as we speak of forgiveness, out of the far 
 past across the Christian ages looks forth upon 
 us One not dimly seen though so far away. His 
 life is a precept even stronger than his word. 
 And while we listen we feel that we can obey, 
 — there is that in him which draws us so ear- 
 nestly after him. The atoning love which shines 
 forth in him brings at one men with men, and 
 men with God. The reconciled soul forgets its 
 hatreds and its discords in Christ Jesus. And 
 the words which breathe from his cross tenderly 
 touch our hearts with a sense of our own need 
 of pardon, and with loving-kindness for those 
 whose worst offences against us are as nothing 
 beside the world's sins against the Sinless One. 
 " Father, forgive them; they know not what 
 they do." 
 
LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION. 
 
IX. 
 
 LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION. 
 
 And lead us not into temptation. — Matt. vi. 13. 
 
 r I ^HE grave problem of the relation of evil to 
 ■*- our moral consciousness has forced itself 
 on the consideration of ethical thinkers ever 
 since men began to think at all. Why do we 
 feel that it is wrong to yield to temptation? 
 Why do we yield to it, feeling it to be wrong ? 
 What is the use of it ? 
 
 The true value and discipline of temptation 
 is sometimes obscured by a theory often held 
 by thinkers, the theory of pure optimism, which 
 makes even the worst only the fermentation of 
 the best. It is so sure that God is over all, 
 and that where He is all will be well, that it 
 falls into the mistake of supposing that every 
 step of the process is also good. "Hell itself 
 is but heaven in the making." But this view 
 labors under the fatal weakness that it blurs 
 
186 Lead Us not into Temptation. 
 
 moral distinctions. If it makes no difference 
 after all, in the long run, whether one has been 
 sinner or saint, if when we stumble we fall 
 upward as far as those climb who never fall 
 at all, why should it be deemed such a grave 
 matter if we stumble ? Sin becomes not even 
 a case of arrested development, but only of in- 
 dividual development, — that is, in the logical 
 results of this speculative view. Besides, this 
 view impugns the character of God, by making 
 Him to have created a moral nature in us which 
 is repelled by the moral evils which, according 
 to this theory, He not merely permits, but which 
 are a part of His moral order of the world. The 
 moral nature of man and the system of the 
 moral universe do not ring true to each other, 
 as they should, since both come from the hand 
 of God. 
 
 But another partial and distorted conception 
 of the nature and function of evil is contained 
 in the necessitarian theory. I do not so much 
 mean the stern old system of rigid Calvinism, 
 which attributed all to the arbitrary will of the 
 Creator, and believed that he created some men 
 
Lead Us not into Temptation. 187 
 
 to be lost, and others to be saved, according to 
 His own hidden purpose. The grim old theo- 
 logians who worked out this explanation of the 
 mysteries of evil, failed to see how completely 
 it abolishes all responsibility for sin, while it 
 leaves all its punishment, — because it does away 
 with moral freedom. The doctrine of necessity 
 to-day, however, follows a different course, and 
 rests not on the metaphysics of God, but on 
 material phenomena. It does away with sin 
 by doing away with responsibility, in making 
 all moral facts the outcome of physical condi- 
 tions. Man is but a curiously wrought and 
 animated machine, and grinds out virtue or vice 
 according to his conditions, as unblamably as 
 a cotton-loom weaves sound or sleazy fabrics 
 according to the material furnished it. As M. 
 Taine states it: "Les actions extremes de Phomme 
 proviennent, non de sa volont^, mais de son 
 nature." Now, no thoughtful person can deny 
 the limits of moral freedom ; but that is a very 
 different thing from denying the freedom within 
 those limits. Granted that this is a question 
 of facts, not of mere sentiment. But sound 
 
188 Lead Us not into Temptation. 
 
 sentiment is also a fad, and has a right to be 
 considered, until disproved by other facts. So 
 long as material science says "Not proven" to the 
 assumption that moral and spiritual phenomena 
 are but links in the materialistic chain, so long 
 the freedom of the will has a right to assert 
 itself, and the consciousness which is a "law 
 of the mind," will deny that it is subject to the 
 "law of the members." It would be a kind of 
 fatalism very quieting to the moral sense, to be- 
 lieve that we are simply to work out our own 
 nature, good and bad equally, as may happen, 
 or, rather, that which we call good and that 
 which we call bad. But the machine turns out 
 scruples, regrets, twinges of conscience, as well 
 as passions and desires ; and we cannot take 
 one part and leave the other part. 
 
 The Christian doctrine of temptation goes 
 beneath both of these superficial theories of 
 Evil. It does not undertake to decide the spec- 
 ulative question of the weight of determining 
 causes, such as physical conditions, inheritance, 
 and the like ; it does say that freedom of choice 
 is also a determining cause, and can mould 
 
Lead Us not into Temptation. 189 
 
 and shape life holily, justly, purely, within 
 these other conditions, if not above them. It 
 asserts, as strongly as the most resolute opti- 
 mist, that God rules, and all must be well. 
 But it says that, because He is able to bring 
 good out of evil, it does not follow that evil 
 is a part of His Providence. As Mr. Chaney 
 has said : " Evil may be good for something, but 
 it is not therefore good" — good to discipline 
 the soul, to show forth God's power, — good to 
 fight against and conquer; but not therefore 
 good to yield to and obey. 
 
 The true function of temptation in our hu- 
 man life was stated by Jesus in one striking 
 pictorial sentence, in a conversation with his 
 disciples, when he warned Peter that tempta- 
 tion was the very sifting of the soul. "Simon, 
 Satan hath desired to have you, that he might 
 sift you as wheat." 
 
 How vivid the picture which it must have 
 called up to his disciples' minds, that primi- 
 tive process which they had seen every har- 
 vest time since they could remember! There 
 is a familiar picture, representing that Oriental 
 
190 Lead Us not into Temptation. 
 
 custom. A woman tall and free, with gar- 
 ments girded close and arms raised high above 
 her head, stands where the winds blow, hold- 
 ing aloft a sieve from which the golden grain 
 falls in a heap at her feet, clean and pure, 
 while the chaff is blown abroad, and only 
 worthless, unclean lumps of clay or stones re- 
 main in the sieve. 
 
 It is a living parable of that which Christ 
 seeks to teach by the illustration. So, he would 
 tell us, temptation is no light thing; it shakes 
 the soul with a perpetual disquiet and annoy; 
 it will not let it remain in peace, any more 
 than the grain which the energetic holder 
 shakes in air can sleep in its receptacle. The 
 winds of heaven, cold and searching, must blow 
 through it. 
 
 Every test must be applied which will sift 
 the golden grain of character, sweet and whole- 
 some, and free it from the chaff of a light- 
 minded and frivolous spirit, which the breezes 
 may blow where they will, — from the lumpish 
 and earthy sins which only by this thorough 
 winnowing can be purged away from the wheat 
 
Lead Us not into Temptation. 191 
 
 of the soul. And if the sifting reveals the 
 substance of the character to be but poor 
 stuff after all, at least the test has been ap- 
 plied; the opportunity has been given. We 
 are revealed honestly, as we are, as we have 
 chosen to be. And how searching the tests are 
 by which the whole being of man and woman 
 is tried and proved in this world of God ! 
 
 I see a man standing in his place in the 
 business community. It is a place of trust, 
 directly or indirectly; for if one is not the 
 agent of another employer in so many words, 
 certainly every man is under bonds to society 
 to do the work which he undertakes to do in 
 society fairly and honestly, whether it be to 
 make goods or to sell them, to keep accounts, 
 or practise law, or heal men's bodies, or preach 
 the gospel. And the tempter comes to him 
 with the subtle suggestion that he commit a 
 breach of trust for selfish ends. It will never 
 be found out; it can all be made right next 
 day or next week; if it should ever come to 
 light, it will only be what other men are do- 
 ing all the time. Success will justify it. It is 
 
192 Lead Us not into Temptation. 
 
 only to lie to the customer by saying a little 
 more or a little less than the truth; it is only 
 to mingle a little quackery in your law or 
 medicine or ministry, just in order, you know, 
 to induce mankind to take the wholesome 
 work which you can do for them when they 
 once believe in you; it is only to use other 
 people's money, without their knowledge or 
 consent, for your own purposes, while it would 
 otherwise be lying idle. Perhaps he hearkens 
 to the subtle tempter; and then, to his horror, 
 he finds that one sin opens the door to an- 
 other and another. He cannot turn back if 
 he would. If he gains that which he seeks, 
 he loses that which he never dreamed of los- 
 ing, human respect and his own sense of char- 
 acter; often and often, he loses that which he 
 staked his soul on, too. Perhaps he stands 
 fast by his sense of right, and bides the sift- 
 ing as he may. It is not easy to resist temp- 
 tation which hardly seems evil, nor to see 
 other men passing him in the race. But the 
 strong wind blows away light purposes and 
 trivial desires from his soul; the shakings of 
 
Lead Us not into Temptation. 193 
 
 his temptations winnow out the solid weight 
 of character ; and he remains strong and proved 
 by his trial. 
 
 A young man feels the stress and strain of 
 the passions which are a part of his nature, 
 given him to be moulded into a power for 
 God and for good. It is so easy to yield but 
 for a little, to look a little way into the darker 
 side of the world, to know something of " life" 
 But it is like the gentle tug with which the 
 waters of Niagara above the rapids entice a 
 boat away from its moorings, to float on the 
 pleasant and prosperous stream. Floating with 
 the current is so easy that it cannot be hard 
 by and hj] to row against it. But what is that 
 dull roar in the distance ? It is the cataract 
 of ruin; and if perchance it is not yet too 
 late, it will only be by the effort of his whole 
 manhood that he comes safe to land, and then 
 at a place far lower down than that where he 
 yielded first. 
 
 Thank God for him who - holds fast by his 
 Christian principle, and shuns the very begin- 
 nings of evil, and endures the blessed ignorance 
 
 13 
 
194 Lead Us not into Temptation. 
 
 of evil which he will later account one of his 
 best rewards, and suffers the mocking laugh of 
 the disappointed fiend. For so he lays the 
 sure foundations of a manhood which is hon- 
 orable because it can honor itself. No ugly 
 blot hidden in its own heart mars its peace. 
 No sudden temptation can sweep it away from 
 its virtue, because it anchored long ago on the 
 rock of duty and conscience. 
 
 The call of charity comes to man or woman, 
 in another way, — a temptation to good. But 
 it is possible here, too, to misunderstand the 
 voice that speaks. One can pretend to one's 
 self that it spoke to his neighbor and not to 
 him, that it said "to-morrow, and not to-day," 
 that it was a mistake to take it for God's 
 voice, since it was only a human one. One 
 can let the luxury of pity be a substitute for 
 the earnestness of deed. Or one can be "obe- 
 dient to the heavenly vision," and taste the 
 sweetness of divinest charity, and give service, 
 even if money be wanting, and, with or with- 
 out the money, the sympathy which is also a 
 form of charitable service. 
 
Lead Us not into Temptation. 195 
 
 The test of opportunity is a very searching 
 one. It finds out the weak places and foibles 
 in the character; but it also finds and perfects 
 the solid worth which is as pure gold. 
 
 Another person has temptations of a more 
 inward sort, but not less real on that account. 
 Doubts and questionings, some of which can 
 never be fully solved in this world, paralyze 
 the soul's action. This is the great temptation 
 of many a thoughtful person. He sees much 
 that seems contrary to reason and justice; he 
 finds difficulties in the way of faith ; and he 
 falls to desponding and despairing, instead of 
 doing the work of life. 
 
 And it must not be forgotten that the 
 spiritual temptations, the tryings which beset 
 us on the side of religion, are of a most search- 
 ing kind. Eeligious indolence solicits the easy, 
 and religious pride the self-satisfied, and re- 
 ligious criticism the censorious spirit. No soul 
 can be so lofty as to rise above all these 
 risks; for none in becoming devout or holy 
 cease thereby to be men. The greatest of the 
 apostles, he whom we may call the greatest 
 
196 Lead Us not into Temptation. 
 
 man that ever lived, has told us that he had 
 a "thorn in the flesh," and thrice he besought 
 the Lord that it might depart from him; but" 
 the only answer was, "My grace is sufficient 
 for thee." 
 
 One is tempted, we may almost say, once 
 for all, and has but a single mortal combat 
 with his foe, and never again is in the same 
 peril. There are moments when a gallantry of 
 conscience, so to speak, seems to raise one per- 
 manently to a higher level of moral purpose, 
 and the soul always afterward stands in the 
 attitude of pre-assured victory toward its spe- 
 cial enemy. 
 
 Another is tempted, and has to fight the 
 same battle over and over, a hundred times. 
 Never winning a decisive victory, he is wor- 
 ried and worn by endless skirmishes. Some 
 taint of passion, or some moral cowardice re- 
 turns upon him, after months or years ; and he 
 is humiliated to find himself w 7 eaker than he 
 had believed. 
 
 Now there are real dangers in all this. 
 
 1. The peril of despondency is one, — and it is 
 
Lead Us not into Temptation. 197 
 
 a very real temptation. It is very hard to be- 
 come reconciled to the fact that circumstances 
 seem made on purpose to thwart us. Are not 
 these difficulties which so beset us in doing 
 our simple duty proof of an ill-ordered world? 
 They are in the constitution of the world, in 
 the very make of our own souls. Can an over- 
 ruling Providence have made everything to 
 work so contrary to His perfect will? 
 
 Christianity meets this state of mind in the 
 only w^ay in which it can be met, by teaching 
 that the Divine plan for human life has re- 
 gard supremely to the growth of human char- 
 acter, while mere outward results count for 
 very little. Easy successes, great works done 
 with everything to favor us would be worth 
 no more than they really cost us, — to be "car- 
 ried to the skies on flowery beds of ease." 
 The discipline of temptation is what w r e must 
 have to toughen the moral fibre. How can 
 the soul learn to choose good rather than evil, 
 unless it has the evil presented to it as well 
 as the good ? This world mysterious ? It is 
 so ; but far more incomprehensible w T ould it be, 
 
198 Lead Us not into Temptation. 
 
 if there were no temptation in it. For then 
 would it lack one of the chief signs of the 
 Providence which has made it the trainiug- 
 p' T -ace of man. There is no room for despon- 
 dency here. Nothing will do more than this 
 very faintness of heart to thwart the accom- 
 plishment of His great will, which surely 
 never meant that this world's perplexities 
 should cause us to lose our heart, our hope, 
 our faith. 
 
 2. Another danger, quite the opposite of this, 
 yet quite as perilous, is the worldly vievj of 
 this whole question. We may let ourselves 
 think that since God has so ordered the cir- 
 cumstances of life, it can make no great differ- 
 ence how we take them. If He subjects you 
 to temptation, can there be great harm, you 
 say, in yielding to temptation? While we are 
 in the world, we are a part of the world, and 
 must take things as they are. Yes ! but we 
 must not be taken by them. This worldly phil- 
 osophy of life might do well enough for us, if 
 there were not that in us, which is greater 
 than the world. For there still remains the 
 
Lead Us not into Temptation, 199 
 
 obstinate fact that you have an immortal soul; 
 and the fact, greater still, that God Himself 
 lives. To obey the weaker part of us, rather 
 than the stronger, can never satisfy us; nor 
 can sin, the consenting to a temptation which 
 we might resist, ever be anything but dis- 
 pleasing to Him who is perfect Holiness and 
 Goodness. When we are "overthrown in that 
 wilderness" of fleshly appetite, or narrow sel- 
 fishness, or passions that corrode the soul, we 
 need not think to escape under His fancied 
 indifference. We know our own true calling 
 and His Nature far too well to do that. 
 
 3. Yet once more, we are often tempted to 
 impatience under the ceaseless pressure of the 
 temptations which seem to enter into life at 
 every turn. Has God, we almost ask, any right 
 to deal thus with His poor earthly children ? 
 He created us ; He knows our weakness, our 
 strange mingling of conscience and of desires 
 that seem too strong for it. How can we rec- 
 oncile all this with the thought of His justice 
 and His mercy ? 
 
 There is only one answer possible. He will 
 
200 Lead Us not into Temptation. 
 
 not lay upon us burdens greater than we are 
 able to bear. We are not under the harrow of 
 an irresistible Fate, but under the leading of a 
 Loving Purpose. The possibility of giving way, 
 indeed, there must be; else were the free-will, 
 which we know if we know anything at all, only 
 a delusion. It is better to have the chance 
 of falling, that we may rise, than to be the 
 puppet of destiny, even though beneficent. But 
 the power of resisting is as great as the possi- 
 bility of yielding ; and if we yield it is in spite 
 of the great plan of God. 
 
 Does temptation mortify you by teaching you 
 your weakness ? But the very smart of your 
 conscience pleading with you not to yield, 
 teaches that there is a God who cares that you 
 should not. The trial has not taught all that 
 it has to teach you, until you have learned also 
 that He is able to help to the uttermost in time 
 of need. "God writes straight," says the prov- 
 erb, "on crooked lines." 
 
 All this applies to the tryings which God 
 sends to us or permits for us ; but we must not 
 forget how large a part we have in the shaping 
 
Lead Us not into Temptation. 201 
 
 of our own lives and that of those dearer to 
 us than our own. God means that part of the 
 answer to it should be given by ourselves, in 
 resolutions and purposes, girded to resist the 
 temptations which will be much or little to us 
 as we may choose to have them. 
 
 If I may quote again the wholesome bitter of 
 Mr. Kuskin ("Letters to the Clergy") : — 
 
 "No man can ask honestly or hopefully to he 
 delivered from temptation, unless he has himself 
 honestly and firmly determined to do the best he 
 can to keep out of it. But in modern days, the 
 first aim of all Christian parents is to place their 
 children in circumstances where the temptations 
 (which they are apt to call c opportunities ') may 
 be as great and as many as possible, where the 
 sight and promise of ' all these things ' in Satan's 
 gift may be brilliantly near, and where the act of 
 * falling down to worship me' may be partly con- 
 cealed by the shelter, and partly excused as invol- 
 untary by the pressure, of the concurrent crowd." 
 
 But after all this is said, this prayer comes 
 home to our need as does no other. "Lead us 
 not into temptation/' we say ; and we must say 
 it, if we know ourselves aright, as long as we 
 
202 Lead Us not into Temptation. 
 
 live in this human world. Dante, in that great 
 passage of his " Paradiso " where he describes 
 the blessed ones in heaven praying our Lord's 
 Prayer together, makes them stop when they 
 come to this clause. They do not need it any 
 longer. And we thank God for them that in 
 His larger light they do not need to pray it. 
 But we need it; and it is surely well that we 
 cannot truly pray it for ourselves alone. The 
 same brotherhood which was in the Prayer at 
 its beginning is in it at the close. "Lead us 
 not." It unites all in one danger, and makes 
 the help of each needful before the All-seeing 
 One for every other. 
 
 All this is beautifully said by Mr. Maurice in 
 a passage which I cannot forbear to read: — 
 
 " Oh, strange and mysterious privilege, that some 
 bed-ridden woman in a lonely garret, who feels 
 that she is tempted to distrust the love and mercy 
 of Him who sent His Son to die for the helpless, 
 should wrestle with that doubt, saying the Lord's 
 Prayer; and that she should be thus asking help 
 for those who are dwelling in palaces, who scarcely 
 dream of want, yet in their own way are in peril 
 
Lead Us not into Temptation. 203 
 
 as great as hers ; for the student, who in his cham- 
 ber is haunted with questions which would seem 
 to her monstrous and incredible, but which to him 
 are agonizing; for the divine in his terrible as- 
 saults from cowardice, despondency, vanity, from 
 the sense of his own heartlessness, from the shame 
 of past neglect, from the appalling discovery of 
 evils in himself which he has denounced in oth- 
 ers, from vulgar outward temptations into which 
 he had proudly fancied that he could not fall, from 
 dark suggestions, recurring often, that words have 
 no realities corresponding to them. ... Of all 
 this the sufferer knows nothing, yet for these 
 she prays. . . . For one and all she cries, 'Lead 
 us not into temptation ! ' Their temptations and 
 hers, different in form, are alike in substance. 
 They, like her, are tempted to doubt that God is, 
 and that He is the Author of good and not of 
 evil; and that He is mightier than the evil; and 
 that He can and will overthrow it, and deliver the 
 universe out of it. This is the real temptation ; 
 there is no other. . . . No man is out of the reach 
 of it who is in God's world ; no man is intended 
 to be out of the reach of it who is God's child. 
 He Himself has led us into this wilderness to be 
 tempted of the devil ; we cannot fly from it ; . . . 
 we cannot choose that we shall not have those 
 
204 Lead Us not into Temptation. 
 
 temptations which are specially fitted to reach our 
 own feelings, tempers, infirmities. . . . But we may 
 cry, 'Lead us not into temptation ;' and praying 
 so, we pray against ourselves. . . . Praying so, 
 that which seemed to be poison becomes medicine; 
 . . . death itself is made the minister of life." 
 
 The sum of the whole doctrine of temptation 
 is in this, — that it is the needful discipline of 
 the immortal soul "Temptations/' says a Ko- 
 man Catholic writer, "are the raw material of 
 glory." And every step of the long struggle, in 
 which the higher gains the mastery over the 
 lower, the spirit over the flesh, is a step on- 
 ward and upward, at which we may well be- 
 lieve that the very angels of God raise songs 
 of triumph. 
 
 I know, indeed, — ah ! who does not ? — by 
 what slow degrees and toilsome and difficult 
 ascent we struggle upward. I know the infi- 
 nite evil if we fail. But shall we not still re- 
 joice to be called to the solemn privilege which 
 belongs to the children of God ? Shall we go 
 complaining all our days of the hardships which 
 prove to us the worth of the soul educated at 
 
Lead Us not into Temptation. 205 
 
 such a cost ? No ! if temptations are your lot 
 in life — the school of trial which is the school 
 of faith — you will go on resolved the more to 
 wrestle with them till they disclose their heart 
 of meaning, remembering that the Captain of 
 our salvation was tried in the same furnace, was 
 "made perfect through sufferings/' was tempted 
 and overcame. 
 
 True, it will be with " stumbling on the dark 
 mountains," with outward fighting and inward 
 fears, scarred and worn with the conflict, not 
 unmarred by regrets and failures, and only by 
 the grace of God at last, that we can gain " the 
 prize of the high calling in Christ Jesus. " But 
 no dearer welcome is given to any who enter 
 the kingdom of God, than that which awaits 
 the faithful soul after such a struggle; and in 
 the light of heaven the harsh experience of the 
 past will be transfigured, — nay, rather, we shall 
 see it as it really is. 
 
 "To him that overcometh," is the word of 
 Christ, "will I grant to sit with me in my 
 throne, even as I also overcame and am set 
 down with my Father in His throne.' ' 
 
BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 
 
X. 
 
 BUT DELIVER US FKOM EVIL. 
 
 But deliver us from evil. — Majt. vi. 13. 
 
 'T^HIS is not merely a continuation of the 
 ^ prayer to be delivered from temptation. 
 In that, as Mr. Maurice says, "a man prays 
 against himself." But now he passes on to that 
 which has been the instinctive cry of the hu- 
 man heart to whatever power it has worshipped, 
 ever since men began to be, and felt the pres- 
 sure and the agony of the countless ills of this 
 troubled world. "For we know that the whole 
 creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together 
 until now. And not only they, but ourselves 
 also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, 
 even we ourselves groan within ourselves." 
 
 We do not need to linger on any statement 
 of what those ills are ; we all know them. No 
 cheerful optimism can banish them out of this 
 world, or make them imaginary. 
 
 14 
 
210 But Deliver Us from Evil. 
 
 So then we can see how our Lord's Prayer 
 should culminate in this final petition, " Deliver 
 us from the evil that is so real." How can we 
 be delivered ? Only by laying hold on and being 
 upheld by Him who is more real. 
 
 Men were tempted enough to let the evils 
 shut out everything else from their sight. There- 
 fore it is that our prayer began at the true be- 
 ginning with the great thought of God, " Our 
 Father," and it passed on to make His Name, 
 His kingdom, His will supremely present to us 
 before it trusted us to speak of our own needs 
 at all. So now at last it brings us face to face 
 with the problem of evil, with our minds full 
 of the thought of God. 
 
 And when our minds are illuminated by that 
 thought I think we all feel that every other 
 evil seems small to us except that of sin and 
 conscious wrong. It is that from which in our 
 deepest prayer we pray to be set free. "O 
 wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me 
 from the body of this death ? " 
 
 Our prayer reads in the Greek, dirb tov 
 7rov7]pov. The Eevised Version translates it 
 
But Deliver Us from Evil. 211 
 
 " the evil one," It ought to be said, if any are 
 troubled by this, that it is a matter of grave 
 dispute if the revisers have not gone too far. 
 The evil may mean simply, in the neuter, to 
 emphasize the intensity of the evil which op- 
 presses us. 
 
 Our Saviour always either uses the language 
 of the time on this subject, to impress some 
 moral or spiritual truth, or in such a manner, 
 in parables or figurative sayings, that it is hard 
 measure if we tie them down as literal asser- 
 tions. When Jesus speaks of the Evil One 
 snatching away good seed from men's hearts; 
 when he tells the Jews that they are " of their 
 father, the Devil ;" when he calls Peter Satan; 
 when he speaks of "the Prince of this world," 
 his language is not crusted into dogma, it is 
 all alive. When he speaks of Belial or Beel- 
 zebub, he is using the very expressions with 
 which the method of thought of his contempo- 
 raries is saturated, to convert them from their 
 method of thought. "If I cast out demons 
 thus, how do your children cast them out?" 
 Saint Paul says that he has delivered certain 
 
212 But Deliver Us from Evil. 
 
 persons "unto Satan, that they may learn not 
 to blaspheme." If this was a literal statement, 
 would it not be the very way to teach them to 
 blaspheme instead of curing them ? Saint Peter 
 speaks of the Devil as "going about like a roar- 
 ing lion, seeking whom he may devour;" is it 
 a literal description, or a vivid figure ? 
 
 It is very significant that when our Saviour 
 speaks of the origin of evil, he says that it is 
 in men's own hearts. As Saint Paul says, " Sin 
 . . . deceived me and slew me." Yet these are 
 the very statements in which we should have 
 expected a clear announcement of the connec- 
 tion of the Evil Spirit with sin, if that tre- 
 mendous idea, as often taught in the Church, 
 be true. 
 
 The fatal flaw in the old Church doctrine 
 was, that it made the Devil and not ourselves 
 responsible, brought him in between the soul 
 and God, and impaired the sense of depen- 
 dence on our Heavenly Father, and the true 
 faith in the redemption which is by Jesus 
 Christ. It made the soul which God pleads 
 with by his Holy Spirit, the prey of the wiles 
 
But Deliver Us from Evil. 213 
 
 of the Lost Spirit. It made Jesus Christ's 
 work an afterpiece to the Fiend's work, salva- 
 tion a device for deliverance from the Enemy 
 without, instead of regeneration within by 
 Christ's spiritual strength. It required faith in 
 the Devil, that is, in just that which we can- 
 not pat faith in. We must believe, then, in 
 the infinitely Bad, in order to be assured of 
 the infinitely Good; must lean on a rotten 
 staff to be upheld, and cross a rotten plank 
 over the abyss, in order to enter the king- 
 dom of Heaven. 
 
 But all the more because we see that such a 
 belief as this is pernicious, we should beware 
 lest we make light of the solemn doctrine alike 
 of reason and of Scripture, which the mediaeval 
 creed only feebly represented. That truth is 
 that evil is a real power in the world, and that 
 the lifelong contest with it may well try us to 
 the uttermost; may overthrow us, save for the 
 mighty succor of our God. Our foes in the 
 Christian warfare are not mere external ene- 
 mies, nor fleshly ills like hunger and pain ; not 
 even sorrow, loss, and separation pierce to the 
 
214 But Deliver Us from Evil. 
 
 heart of this intense strife. The Christian doe- 
 trine of evil makes it far more than a vague 
 abstraction; it is all quick with wicked life, 
 incarnate in every wrong thought and thing, 
 standing over against God. There is no more 
 dangerous heresy of our time, none which 
 more cuts the sinews of the moral fibre, than 
 the idea that evil is mere weakness or igno- 
 rance, and not a deadly power, more active 
 than a poison in the blood, more spreading 
 than a weed in the ground. "Whether it be 
 an It or a Him against whom we fight the 
 battle of the Spirit, is of no consequence to 
 us, human or divine. That evil is personal, 
 directly our wills yield to it we know, and 
 that the only refuge from it, the Divine Power 
 which can alone deliver us, is personal, we 
 also know. But that evil is personal before 
 we absorb it into our own wills, we do not 
 know, though we know that we should bear 
 ourselves towards it exactly as if it were." 
 
 We in this church may have gained an ad- 
 vantage in the simplicity of our faith, by the 
 omission of certain phrases in our Liturgy. 
 
But Deliver Us from Evil. 215 
 
 But we lose more than we gain if we fail to 
 remember that the real enemies indicated by 
 the w T ords "the world, the flesh, and the Devil 5 ' 
 beset us every hour. Pfere Eavignan once re- 
 marked of the devils of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury; " Messieurs, leur chef d'ceuvre, c'est de 
 s'etre fait nier par ce siecle." 
 
 The sense of imperfection is profoundly 
 bound up with the central thought of religion. 
 I do not mean to say that religion centres in 
 the doctrine of Sin; far otherwise, although it 
 is sometimes so believed. But where the con- 
 . sciousness of Divine things is devout and 
 strong, where the conscience is quick and sen- 
 sitive to the call of duty, where God is felt 
 to be present, and loyalty to Him is a living 
 power in the soul, — there will be found a 
 sober conviction of the woful falling-short that 
 is in us. Not merely that we do not know 
 our duty perfectly; that would be only short- 
 sightedness; we would not be condemned for 
 not seeing far. The inevitable limitations of 
 our nature would not involve any moral qual- 
 ity of penal defect. Ignorance would not be 
 
216 But Deliver Us from Evil. 
 
 guilt, but innocence. So far as it was really- 
 unconscious of moral obligation, that obligation 
 would for it not exist. 
 
 We are well aware, however, that we fail 
 to follow the law when we perceive it. Our 
 knowledge is in no wise the measure of our 
 service of it. Then follows in all high and 
 thoughtful natures the humbling consciousness 
 of weakness and imperfection. The first con- 
 viction that we have transgressed arises when 
 we know, deep down in our souls, that we 
 might have obeyed and knew enough to obey 
 and ought to have obeyed, and failed to obey. 
 This conviction is called forth, indeed, wher- 
 ever there is a keen sense of the moral law; 
 for such a sense is the way in which religion 
 takes hold of many a man. When we appre- 
 hend the moral law we see a little way into 
 the Being of God. 
 
 And yet this conviction is roused in its 
 full intensity only when we pass beyond this 
 impersonal presentation of duty to our minds, 
 and see the Lawgiver behind the law. When 
 we think of God, of the Power that holds the 
 
But Deliver Us from Evil. 217 
 
 universe from falling into nothing, of the Good- 
 ness which our highest thought of holiness only 
 faintly shadows forth, of the Truth that is re- 
 flected in absolute law of duty, of the Fatherly 
 Love revealed to us by Jesus Christ, of all 
 this as personal and vital in Him, — how poor 
 and thin seems our best attainment! 
 
 That great Light pouring down into the very 
 hiding-places of our weakness discloses it to our 
 own startled sight. It is always the light which 
 reveals the shadow. 
 
 But does it follow from this that the shadows 
 are only shadows, with no substance in them ? 
 There are those who will tell you so; that this 
 stern sense of our defect in the presence of the 
 great thoughts of religion is a morbid excess of 
 feeling, and that its true cure is to be found, 
 not in efforts after an impossible perfection, nor 
 yet in the soul's desire for communion with 
 God, but simply in trying to live a plain, hon- 
 est, peaceable life, without spiritual flights. But 
 the soul has a deeper and a truer voice than 
 this. It tells us that though the light does in- 
 deed reveal the shadows, it does not make them. 
 
218 But Deliver Us from Evil. 
 
 This is done by the light and a solid body 
 together. Wherever there is a shadow, there is 
 a substantial reality behind it, cutting off a cer- 
 tain portion of space from the light which over- 
 flows all around it. Sin — am I told ? — is 
 merely a negative state, merely the absence of 
 goodness ! Is it then a statement which ex- 
 hausts the matter, to say that night is only the 
 absence of daylight? It is that; but w r hat 
 makes the daylight absent ? When the strong 
 mystery of the darkness wraps us round with 
 its awful silences, broken only by the voices 
 that come we know not how or whence, and 
 the world lies dim and changed about us, and 
 other worlds start out into the deep vaults of 
 the sky with their pale fires that kindle answer- 
 ing lights of memory and reflection in the world 
 within us, then that which veils us from the 
 cheerful sun is not merely the emptiness of night ; 
 it is this very earth on which we stand. It is the 
 shadow of that tremendous substantial fact, which 
 projects its mighty cone of blackness off into 
 the infinite spaces ; and we call it night, though 
 all the time the sun is shining as brightly as 
 
But Deliver Us from Evil. 219 
 
 ever at the centre of the solar system ; but the 
 earth has come between us and his light. The 
 very brightness of the sun makes the shadow 
 more dark ; the light and the earth conspire 
 together to that end. And so with this ques- 
 tion of moral evil. Will you say that it is a 
 mere shadow of the fancy, the work of a morbid 
 spirit, just as any man can make it dark for 
 himself by shutting his own eyes even on the 
 brightest day ? But no ! A universal phenom- 
 enon can be explained only by a substantial 
 fact behind it. We cannot rationally suppose 
 that the generality of mankind, from the be- 
 ginning of history, have been thus misled, and 
 that the highest and purest souls have been 
 most misled. The shadow of moral evil has 
 been felt among all races of men, so far as the 
 light of any religion has been theirs. What 
 does it indicate, if not that the earth with its 
 passions and its evils came between them and 
 the light, to make darkness ? 
 
 We smooth over life, sometimes, till we 
 smooth away all its meaning. The fact re- 
 mains, from generation to generation, that hu- 
 
220 But Deliver Us from Evil. 
 
 man nature has its mingled substance of good 
 and evil, and that it casts its shadow, long and 
 dark, before the light of God's righteous law. 
 If we loose our hold for a moment on the word 
 which is associated with the church and relig- 
 ion, the word Sin, and take the word which 
 carries practical religion into daily life, the word 
 Eight, the whole subject is at once depolarized 
 for us. Eight = that which is straight. A 
 right line is the shortest distance between two 
 points ; there may be a million crooked ones, 
 there can be but one which is straight. A 
 right word is the only way to tell what is 
 true; there can be a million lies, there can be 
 but one truth. A right act is the straight way 
 to obey God; there may be a million crooked 
 paths of conduct, there can be only one straight- 
 forward one. By that plain rule of right do 
 those Commandments written on yonder wall 
 appeal to us, not as the arbitrary edict of God, 
 but as formulating eternal laws of His own 
 Being and of our being, given on Sinai, on tables 
 of stone, but given also on tables of the human 
 heart. 
 
But Deliver Us from Evil. 221 
 
 The long ages of the past accumulated a store 
 of evils into which the children of the present 
 have entered. History opens to us a record on 
 whose pages is the trail of blood and the savor 
 of wrong. The greed of neighbor against neigh- 
 bor, the lusts of cruelty and injustice and re- 
 venge that are written there, we are tempted, 
 in some moods of mind, to acknowledge to be 
 our birth-wrong, — a law laid upon us by our 
 fore-elders; and so we would fain hold them 
 responsible for our defects of will and duty, 
 deeming that we are bound with the chains of 
 our fathers' sins. 
 
 Then, too, here we are in this world, not 
 alone, but participants, whether we will or no, 
 in what the French phrase terms the " solidarity 
 of mankind." It is not more certain that the 
 markets of the civilized world sympathize with 
 one another, than it is that the morals of the 
 civilized world are closely intertwined. This 
 is the great distinction between the modern 
 world and all the preceding centuries. Then 
 men could shut themselves away in their vil- 
 lage or their cell; at any rate, nations were 
 
222 But Deliver Us from Evil. 
 
 insulated from one another. But now the deli- 
 cate currents of thought and sympathy pass 
 beneath all sundering seas. 
 
 "Who can shut out, for example, the influ- 
 ences of the literature of his time ? Though it 
 swarm like the plagues of Egypt with disorder 
 and disease, though the French novel be a 
 dram of intellectual drunkenness, though the 
 brilliant essay be sown thick with disbeliefs of 
 the true and beautiful and good, we read in 
 the name, forsooth, of culture; or, if we read 
 not, the journals distil the gist of all into pol- 
 ished phrase, and those w T ho seek the reputa- 
 tion of a bel esprit, dip in it the arrows of their 
 repartee, and barb their winged wit with its 
 poison. 
 
 Who can shut out the influences of the gen- 
 eral tone of feeling about him ? If the times 
 are over eager in the pursuit of wealth, over 
 giddy in that of pleasure, if the anchor of com- 
 mon thought fails to find holding ground on 
 the deep seas of speculation, and the ship drifts 
 with the wind, are we not all passengers ? 
 
 Thus we release ourselves from personal re- 
 
But Deliver Us from UviL 223 
 
 sponsibility for those things which we share 
 with those about us. But there is a test, and 
 a simple one, for our responsibleness. How 
 goes the matter in our secret spirit? Does 
 that answer willingly to the outside influences, 
 or does it struggle against them ? The evil is 
 ours only when we accept it; as long as w r e 
 wage even what seems a losing battle, the en- 
 emy is not master of the field. It is the secret 
 sin which belongs to us, hid in our own hearts, 
 which He sets in the light of His countenance. 
 
 Besides, the personal responsibility w T hich is 
 ours comes to us in ways which we cannot es- 
 cape. We, respectable persons, of moral lives 
 and good habits, what have we to do with the 
 evil of the wicked world ? We may answer 
 with the apostle, "Much every way." A sin 
 is often only the exaggeration of a virtue. It 
 is necessary that a man should eat to live, but 
 if he lives to eat, he falls into the sin of glut- 
 tony. Money is the means of life, but if he 
 make life the means to money, he falls into the 
 sin of avarice. Dress is the mark of a civil- 
 ized being, but if we make our civilization to 
 
224 But Deliver Us from Evil. 
 
 consist in fine clothes, we fall into the sin of 
 luxury. And, more, it is even possible for us 
 to keep within the moderate limit in our own 
 judgment, and yet to add by example to the 
 weight of evil influence that presses on another 
 soul. 
 
 Here is a man of highest character, one of 
 the leaders of public opinion, foremost in every 
 good and generous thing. He is proud, as he 
 has a right to be, of his good name. But he 
 may use that pride to repel and to abase, and 
 so may teach younger men the overbearing 
 lesson which apart from his generous heart will 
 make them one day grind the faces of the 
 poor. 
 
 Here is one noted for austere honor. But 
 one day a young man who has been educated 
 to revere him, hears him point his conversa- 
 tion by a story of double meaning, or sees him 
 bate his business principles to secure a bargain ; 
 and henceforth to that youth austere honor is 
 but an empty shell. 
 
 Here is a woman who loves her church and 
 holy things ; but the trials to temper, or temp- 
 
But Deliver Us from Evil. 225 
 
 tations to evil speech, do not come at church; 
 they wait for her at home, where those who 
 copy her pattern in larger letters, children and 
 servants, study and lay to heart the application 
 of her Christianity. 
 
 The fashion of our time is to fancy that vice 
 can be expelled from the community by legis- 
 lative enactment. " Begin at the outside, where 
 we can see something, and work from that in- 
 wardly." Now doubtless much can be done 
 in this way, if the enactment really expresses 
 the honest moral sense of the community. For 
 then it ceases to be a mere external force; it 
 works with the moral weight of a whole people 
 behind it. But the essential thing which we 
 ought never to lose sight of is that no change 
 is of permanent worth which does not substi- 
 tute a holier spirit in place of the evil which 
 it expels. You can really deliver from the evil 
 only by inspiring with good. 
 
 And this is where the Christian prayer finds 
 its answer in the Christian method. This is 
 what the Gospel of Christ claims to do, and does, 
 by giving motives and inspirations all its own. 
 
 15 
 
226 But Deliver Us from Evil. 
 
 My friends, there is always danger, when 
 we discuss the great questions of Christian 
 theology, lest we forget that they are not only 
 matters of speculative interest, but have to do 
 most immediately and urgently with the soul's 
 very life. The theological statement is simply 
 the best statement which men can make of the 
 working out of spiritual truths by the soul. 
 Nowhere is it more profoundly true than when 
 we are dealing with the problem of evil, that 
 we are tempted, when we speculate about it, 
 to lose sight of the fact that it is all the time 
 the most tremendous reality of life or of death, 
 in their most intense form, spiritual life or 
 spiritual death to others all around us. I am 
 not of those w T ho think that wickedness goes 
 only with poverty and shabby clothes. There 
 is plenty of it, in some forms, in the best 
 society. All the sins which spring from self- 
 indulgence and hardness of heart and selfish- 
 ness can make themselves as much at home 
 there as anywhere else. You do not know 
 much about yourself if you have not yet 
 learned that you can be tempted, and that 
 
But Deliver Us from Evil. 227 
 
 temptation is a tremendous power, capable of 
 shaking the soul to its very centre. But there 
 is much in our way of life to protect us from 
 some forms of evil, and amid the temptations 
 to other forms of it to hide us from ourselves. 
 So that, I say again, the danger is that for 
 the most part our lives, easy, sheltered, sunny, 
 prosperous, with love all about us and only 
 pleasant looks in friendly faces, will lead us 
 to forget what a battle is being fought all the 
 time by other souls. To them the problem of 
 evil is not a speculation ; it is the question 
 whether they can keep honest, temperate, truth- 
 ful, manly; whether after falling, they can win 
 their way back with struggle to some place 
 far off and faintly resembling that fair place 
 of innocence w x here they once stood. 
 
 I want to say to you, with all the solem- 
 nity of truth, that there is not one of us who 
 can put off our whole responsibility in regard 
 to these other children of God. We wrap our- 
 selves in our own mantle of respectability, and 
 are like men who should keep themselves 
 warm beside the cheerful fire in a secure for- 
 
228 But Deliver Us from Evil. 
 
 tress, while they hear the wild beasts outside 
 in the darkness where the belated traveller 
 wanders. We are more responsible than we 
 know for the lions that roar outside and for 
 the fate of him whom they rend asunder. It 
 is not well for us if we leave him who is 
 fighting against the devil of drink, of impurity, 
 of weakness, without a helping hand in his 
 struggle. I am not preaching the condoning 
 of wrong unrepented of, but a very different 
 thing, — that we need to be quicker than we are 
 to do what is the very work of heaven. For 
 we are told that "there is joy among the an- 
 gels of God over one sinner that repenteth." 
 There is no doubt that if those who are com- 
 paratively safe from these evils will do their 
 part, for example, simply to create and brace a 
 public opinion to enforce the laws against in- 
 temperance, multitudes would be saved who 
 now go down to the pit. 
 
 It comes home in another way. Is there 
 one of us, mature men and women, who does 
 not know some one who is trying, it may be 
 weakly and fitfully, with that sense of previous 
 
But Deliver Us from Evil. 229 
 
 defeat which takes away courage and faith, but 
 still trying to put his tempter under his feet? 
 Can you do nothing by a kind word and the 
 grasp of a helping hand to make him strong ? 
 It is better to do it than. by and by to cry, 
 " Would God that I had known my opportunity 
 before it was too late " ! 
 
 I tell you, too, that there are those on 
 whom the world looks coldly, and by their 
 own fault, too, who are so fighting the devils in 
 their own hearts and lives that they may be 
 much more worthy of the " Well done " hereafter 
 than those who live in placid self-content, 
 never shaken by a great temptation, compla- 
 cent in their own hearts, looking down on 
 those who if they have greatly sinned have 
 greatly repented, and never knowing how the 
 soul scarred with defeat and bruised by sin 
 may yet conquer by the grace of God. 
 
 Thus we have faced the fact that the evils 
 against which we should supremely pray are 
 those of Moral Evil. Yet we will not make 
 light of the other things which we long" to 
 escape from. Here also we find refuge in the 
 one thought of our God. 
 
230 But Deliver Us from Evil. 
 
 Our religion teaches us that God is Love. 
 Faith in His love implies trust in His lov- 
 ing-kindness. But what kind of faith is that 
 which can trust no further than it can see ? 
 Life is hard, you say; it bears painfully upon 
 you. Be thankful still, and all the more be 
 thankful, that you know that behind its stern 
 seeming is this blessed Beality, the one ulti- 
 mate ground of Christian Faith, the Living 
 God, our Father in Christ Jesus. If, indeed, 
 we may know Him as the Father, we can 
 flee from Him by fleeing to Him ; the darkest 
 affliction will drive us to the Heart of the 
 Mystery, which is God ; and we shall find 
 that we can rest the weary heart there in 
 communion with Himself. It will be as in 
 that passage of the ancient Scripture, only in 
 a far higher and holier sense, — ■ as when old 
 Isaac lay blind from age and bowed with in- 
 firmity on his bed of sickness, he knew in the 
 son whom he felt ministering to him in his 
 needs, that though "the hands were the hands 
 of Esau, the voice was the voice of Jacob." 
 So, only more deeply and with more sacred 
 
But Deliver Us from Evil. 231 
 
 meaning, the soul can hear, even when the 
 touch that deals with it seems rough and 
 strange, a Father's voice speaking words of 
 cheer and peace. Not for the happiness of 
 earth as thy being's end and aim, wast thou 
 created, child of God, but for that deeper 
 joy, whose fruits of righteousness are won not 
 without toil and pain ! " Trial, like frost and 
 snow, kindly to the root, though hurtful to the 
 flower." 
 
 All these things are in the world, we know 
 that they ,will be, yet we pray against them, 
 and we do well. For we should remember 
 that "men have not been praying in vain 
 against it for six thousand years, but rather 
 have been stemming, overcoming it continually ; 
 each of their prayers if offered in ever so much 
 dimness and confusion, opening a vision out 
 of the darkness." So then we can pray it, 
 remembering always that God is better and 
 stronger. 
 
 "By desiring what is perfectly good," says 
 a great writer of our own time, "we are a 
 part of the Divine power against evil, widening 
 
232 But Deliver Us from Evil 
 
 the skirts of light, and making the struggle 
 with darkness narrower." 
 
 And though to none of us can it perfectly- 
 come in this world, that day of deliverance for 
 which we pray, we know that it shall come at 
 last. We have moments of that heaven here, 
 of rest and trust and peace ; and beyond, we 
 have the assurance: "I shall be satisfied when 
 I awake with Thy likeness." 
 
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 
 
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 POSITIVE RELIGION. 
 
 ESSAYS, FRAGMENTS, AND HINTS. 
 
 By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 
 
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 at three score and ten years. They treat of the growth of religion ; of relig- 
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 of pain, of immortality and kindred topics. The author is among the best 
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 is to exhibit religion not so much "as a thing of opinion, of emotion, or of 
 ceremony, as an element in men's own experience, or a force, mighty and 
 even passionate, in the world's affairs." Such an endeavor is highly lauda- 
 ble, and the work has been well done. — Christian Mirror. 
 
 A collection of a acute, reverent, and suggestive talks on some of the great 
 themes of religion. Many Christians will dissent from his free handling of 
 certain traditional views, dogmas of Christianity, but they will be at once with 
 him in his love of goodness and truth, and in his contention that religion finds 
 its complete fruition in the lives rather than the speculative opinions of men. — 
 N. Y. Tribune. 
 
 Mr. Allen strikes straight out from the shoulder, with energy that shows 
 his natural force not only unabated, but increased with added years. " At 
 Sixty: A New Year Letter" is sweet and mellow with the sunshine of the 
 years that bring the philosophic mind. But we are doing what we said that 
 we must not, and must make an arbitrary end. Yet not without a word of 
 admiration for the splendid force and beauty of many passages. These are 
 the product of no artifice, but are uniformly an expression of that humanity 
 which is the writer's constant end and inspiration. In proportion as this finds 
 free and full expression, the style assumes a warmth and color that not only 
 give an intellectual pleasure, but make the heart leap up with sympathetic 
 courage and resolve. — J. W. C. 
 
 Sold everywhere. 
 
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 other works, she has brought together a large amount of rich devotional 
 material in a poetic form. Her present book does not disappoint us. 
 We hail with satisfaction every contribution to devotional literature 
 which shall be acceptable to liberal Christians. This selection is made 
 up from a wide range of authors, and there is an equally wide range of 
 topics. It is an excellent book for private devotion or for use at the 
 family altar." — Christian Register. 
 
 " It is made up of brief selections in prose and verse, with accompa- 
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 "They are the words of those wise and holy men, who, in all ages, 
 have realized the full beauty of spiritual experience. They are words to 
 comfort, to encourage, to strengthen, and to uplift into faith and aspira- 
 tion. It is pleasant to think of the high and extended moral development 
 that were possible, if such a book were generally the daily companion and 
 counsellor of thinking men and women Every day of the year has its 
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 " Designed, as its title indicates, to cheer and elevate, and to be a bright com- 
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 EVERY-DAY LIFE AND 
 
 EVERY-DAY MORALS. 
 
 By GEORGE LEONARD CHANEY. 
 16mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 
 
 A series of Discourses on the relation of Art, Business, the Stage, the Press, 
 and the Pulpit, to Morals, as exemplified in Every-Day Work and Recreations. 
 
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 ETHICAL RELIGION. 
 
 By William Mackintire Salter. 
 12mo. Cloth. Price, $1.50. 
 
 A FEW CRITICAL OPINIONS. 
 
 One of the best and most useful books lately given to the public is " Ethical 
 Religion," by William Mackintire Salter, well known to all the leading 
 thinkers in this country. The book, as stated in the preface, is made up of lec- 
 tures given, for the most part, before the Society for Ethical Culture, of Chicago, 
 and nowise claims to represent the movement, but simply reflects the author's 
 own attitude of mind upon the various topics treated, namely: Ethical Religion, 
 The Ideal Element in Morality, What is a Moral Action ? Is there a higher Law? 
 Is there anything Absolute about Morality? Darwinism in Ethics, The Social 
 Ideal, The Rights of Labor, Personal Morality, On Some Features of the Ethics 
 of Jesus, Do the Ethics of Jesus satisfy the Needs of our Time? Good Friday 
 from a Modern Standpoint, The Success and the Failure of Protestantism, Why 
 Unitarianism fails to satisfy, The Basis of the Ethical Movement, The Suprem- 
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 is very charming, and what he says upon the various topics is said in a thoughtful 
 and earnest way. It contains three hundred and thirty-two pages, printed on 
 fine paper, and beautifully bound in cloth. The book deserves, and no doubt will 
 have, a large sale. — Truth. 
 
 Here is the soul of religion. Here is the living worship. There are no 
 husks here, true; but there are buds and blossoms in abundance and fragrance. 
 There is here no " washing of cups and platters," granted; but there are here 
 *' the weightier matters of the law," — the eternal law of right. In a word, there 
 is here, in glowing, suggestive epitome, the essence of true human being and 
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 recesses ; and if we read it well, we rise from it to stand erect and free as never 
 before, — unless, indeed, we rise from it to fall upon our faces to hide ourselves 
 from ourselves. — The New Ideal. 
 
 I especially thank you for Salter's book. I have read it with great profit, 
 both as a philosopher and a man. Say to the author, if you think it will interest 
 him, that I feel theoretically, as well as practically, benefited by his book. He 
 lays down with_ great clearness, as well as exactness, the leading principles of 
 philosophic ethics to his hearers and readers, and illustrates them by excellent 
 and fitting examples from life, — the little everv-day life, as well as the great 
 historical life. And then the noble and pure spirit that pervades the entire book ! 
 It is in the true sense a book of edification. — Letter from Prof. Harold 
 H off ding, of Copenhagen. 
 
 And the foundation of the new religion ? Morality ! — of course, not that old 
 morality which the Christian churches teach, but the real morality which, as 
 Salter describes it, is something infinitely higher, is an independent idea, an inde- 
 pendent law of the human spirit, is older than all convention and tradition and 
 books and persons, and therefore able to overset and supplant them all. — 
 Evangelical Church Advertiser, Berlin, 
 
 Sold by all booksellers. 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers, 
 
 BOSTON, MASS. 
 
Messrs. Roberts Brothers Publications. 
 
 THE BLESSED LIFE. 
 
 Favorite Hymns selected by the Editor of « Quiet Hours/' 
 " Sursum Corda," " The Wisdom Series. ,, i8mo, cloth, red 
 edges. Price $1.00. 
 
 From the Church Union. 
 
 "This is a collection of more than two hundred hymns, all devotional, 
 most of them familiar, being taken from current hymn-books of various 
 religious orders, and wisely discriminated. Watts, Wesley, Doddridge, 
 Baxter, and Cowper will live while the English tongue is spoken ; and 
 when that has perished, perchance the spirit which animated these beau- 
 tiful hymns will survive, ever increasing in delightful harmony through 
 endless ages." 
 
 From the Inter-Ocean. 
 
 " The author selects in this little volume some of the favorite hymns 
 such as our mothers and grandmothers have loved and sung, as well as 
 some of the more modern favorites, the object being to gather these old 
 favorites into one small volume, suitable for the sick room or the quiet 
 hours of rest. Many of them are grand and beautiful, and the world will 
 be many hundred years older before the lips of men will sing any songs 
 breathing more fervent devotion, or express in sweeter notes the worship of 
 the soul. The author arranges them under the heads: 'Morning and 
 Evening ; ' ' The Glory of the Lord ; ' ' Fervent in Spirit ; ' ' Serving the 
 Lord ; ' ' Rejoicing in Hope ; ' * Patient in Tribulation ; ' * Trust in the 
 Lord ; ' < The Good Shepherd ; ' ' Within the Veil,' &c. 
 
 From The Churchman. 
 " ' The Blessed Life' is a volume of favorite hymns, selected by the 
 editor of 'Quiet Hours' and ' Sursum Corda.' With a single excep- 
 tion, namely, Whittier's poem of 'The Eternal Goodness,' it is made up 
 of selections from hymn-books prepared for worship, and contains, there- 
 fore, only such hymns as have been pronounced good by others besides 
 the editor. It represents the best of those which have been judged better 
 than ordinary." 
 
 Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, by the 
 Publishers, 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 
 
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