his time men had been trying to get extraordinary good things out of nature in accordance with the whims and fancies of astrologers and alchemists they had dreamt of making gold, or finding the elixir of life. But all this was profitless because it was done in ignorance of nature's actual laws. And Bacon spoke a prophetic word when he said 'Nature can only be controlled by being obeyed'; that is—in reverent correspondence with nature as it is, is the secret of power. Now, in the higher region, that is what our Lord taught us about prayer. Man had been offering all sorts of prayers, sacrifices, propitiations. That God mercifully regarded such ignorant worship we cannot doubt: but it was ignorant of God's character and method. Now, so far as is good for us, our Lord has enlightened us about the nature and method of God: and He has shown us that prayer should not be an attempt to impose our own whims and fancies on the wisdom of God, but a constant act of correspondence by which we bring our short-sighted wills and reasons into correspondence, the intelligent correspondence of sons, with the perfect reason and will of God, the all-wise Father of all human souls and of the great universe.

5. Here finally we find an answer to all our manifold questionings as to what we may pray for, and what we may not.

Our Lord gave us that answer also in another way at another time-in the prayers of His passion. In His passion He prayed for the coming of the kingdom, in that great prayer recorded in St. John's Gospel. He prayed then without qualification. Similarly, He prayed for those rough soldiers who were unwittingly doing Him such awful wrong: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' But when, in the garden, He asked to be Himself delivered from the coming agony, in the true humility of . His manhood He prayed conditionally, 'Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.'

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Now, that is exactly the lesson of the Lord's Prayer. There are many things which God has revealed to us that He intends to give us. He has promised that He will give us all those things which belong to His kingdom and its righteousness. For these things we can pray, not only urgently, but with the certainty of faith that we must win them for ourselves and others by importunate asking. We cannot, of course, force the will of others, but we can with the assurance of faith win for others, as for our

selves, the spiritual opportunities, resources, and advantages of God's kingdom.

There are also many things God has revealed that He does not mean to give us, and there are laws of His ordering, spiritual and physical, that by revelation or natural investigation He has made known. For these things, then, or against these laws, we must not pray: we must not ask that God will violate His general laws in our private interest.

But there is a great mass of things which lie in between these two regions of certainty. We do not know if it is God's will that this or that person should recover from sickness, or this or that calamity should be averted. God is wiser than we are. We do not know whether it is God's will that we should have the rain that is so necessary for our crops. There are things like these that lie in a region of uncertainty into which the intelligence of man cannot penetrate. So then as the object of prayer is not to bring the divine will down to the human, but to lift the human up into correspondence with the divine, for all these uncertain things we can pray indeed, but uncertainly-'If it be possible, let this or that come to pass; nevertheless, not my will, but Thine, be done.'

CHAPTER VIII

UNWORLDLINESS

THE keynote of St. Matthew vi. is, as we have seen, this: that the true motive of the religious life in all its activities is simply the desire for divine approval. It owns one only master, God, whom it trusts with an absolute confidence. There results from this a complete freedom from the anxieties of the world. It is then an unworldly disposition, as the result of simplicity of motive, that our Lord proceeds to enjoin:

'Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth and rust doth consume, and where thieves dig through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: for where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.'

In the days when our Lord spoke these words people mostly preserved their money and other treasure by concealing it, as in many parts of Europe they do still. Thus the task of

thieves was, in the main, to 'dig through' into places in houses or fields where treasure was likely to be hidden. This is the meaning of our Lord's metaphor. We are to lay up our store in heaven, where no thief can get at it, and where no natural process of corruption can affect it. Now heaven is God's throne. It is where His will works centrally and peacefully; and the kingdom of the Christ is the kingdom of heaven, because, though a visible society in the world, God is there specially known and recognized, and His good will towards man is consequently at work with a special freedom and fullness.

If then you are asked, what is it to lay up treasure in heaven, I think you may answer with great security: To lay up treasure in heaven is to do acts which promote, or belong to, the kingdom of God; and what our Lord assures us of is that any act of our hands, any thought of our heart, any word of our lips, which promotes the divine kingdom by the ordering whether of our own life or of the world outside-all such activity, though it may seem for the moment to be lost, is really stored up in the divine treasurehouse; and when the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem, shall at last appear, that honest effort of ours, which seemed so ineffectual, shall be