And I am afraid there has been a good deal of a like mechanical praying in the Christian Church. But the value of prayer, our Lord warns us, is not to be measured by its length, but the amount of will and intention we put into it. There is always need that we should remember this. There is always a danger that in praying dutifully and according to some rule our praying should be becoming mechanical, and that we should find ourselves measuring its value by its length.

Secondly, Christian prayer is not for the sake. of informing God:

'Be not therefore like unto them [the Gentiles]: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.'

Why is it, then, that God requires of us to pray? The answer is a quite simple one. It. is because God is our Father, and He wishes us to be trained in habits of conscious intercourse with Him. Therefore, just as many blessings which God wishes to give us are made dependent on our working for them, so many other blessings are made dependent on our regular and systematic asking. God wills to give them, but He wills to give them only if we ask Him; and this in order that the very

necessity of continually holding intercourse with a personal God and making requests to Him, may train us in the habit of realizing that we . are sons of our heavenly Father. The wisdom of this provision is best realized if we reflect how easily, when the practice of prayer is abandoned, the sense of a personal relation to God fades out of our human life. We are to pray then not to inform God, but to train ourselves in habits of personal intercourse with our Father who is in heaven.

CHAPTER VII

THE LORD'S PRAYER

OUR Lord is not satisfied with giving us abstract principles of prayer, but teaches us how to pray by giving us an example:

'After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven,' &c.

In regard to this great prayer, I would content myself with calling attention to the points of chief importance, and trying to explain some few difficulties, which lie in the separate clauses, and then very briefly indicating some of the principles which as a whole it enshrines.

'Our Father which art in heaven.'

The spirit of a prayer depends in great measure on whether the worshipper's thought of God is true or false, adequate or inadequate. The Christian invokes God under the completest of all His titles, the title of Father, for 'God

hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father'.' And we call Him the Father which is in heaven, not because He is far off us-for in the kingdom of Christ heavenly and earthly things are mingled and we 'are come unto the heavenly Jerusalem 2'-but because He is raised far above all the pollution and wilfulness and ignorance of man 'as the heaven is higher than the earth.' So we invoke our Father, infinitely above us yet unspeakably near. And the first prayer we offer is:

'Hallowed be thy name.'

What is the name of God? That is very well worth our consideration. The name of God in the Bible means that whereby He discloses or reveals Himself. You may indeed almost say that the name of God means God Himself as He is manifested. God has shown Himself to man; He has spelt out His great name, letter by letter, syllable by syllable, before the eyes of men or into their hearts, in nature, in conscience, by the voice of His prophets and in Jesus Christ . His Son. Thus to hallow or sanctify His name is to set store by His revelation of Himself, as Father, Son and Spirit, one God. To pray that

'Gal, iv. 6.

Hebr. xii. 22.

His name may be hallowed, is to pray that His revelation of Himself may be accepted of men, and His religion professed openly and secretly: that He may be acknowledged in conduct and worship, in Church and in State, on Sunday and on week-day.

'Thy kingdom come.'

The kingdom of God meant to the Jews, of course, the kingdom of the Messiah: that is to say that coming age, when heaven and earth shall be fused in one, when God shall be manifested in His glory, when all things shall be seen in their true light, and the reign of Christ in truth and meekness and righteousness shall be not only real but also manifest and indisputable. This is 'the end of the world,' the 'far off, divine event,' which is still future. At times, indeed, the Church as it already exists among us is called 'the kingdom of God,' but at other times (as is implied here) the Church is regarded as a divine institution, representing indeed the kingdom here and now in the world, but also preparing for its arrival in the future. To pray for the coming of the kingdom is therefore to pray for the spread and progress of the Church, and also for the diffusion in every way of all