first lifted up to God once, and again, and again,—" Thy name," "Thy kingdom," "Thy will," so in the summary of the law "the first and great commandment" is, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind." Furthermore, in the Lord's Prayer, after having poured out our hearts in longings for the Divine glory, when we come down to our own wants, we are taught to give our neighbour an equal share in each petition: "Give us," "forgive us," "lead us," "deliver us;" thus following in the second part of it the second. great commandment of the law, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Thus the commandments and the Lord's Prayer mutually confirm each other in regard to the relative proportions of the Godward and selfward sides of the Christian life.

We have spoken of the two parts of the prayer as two hemispheres, the two together making up a full-orbed Christianity. Perhaps a better idea of their mutual relations may be had by changing the figure. It is evident that in the first part and in the second part of the prayer we are in entirely different regions; similarly in the first and in the second great commandments of the law. The former in each case may be regarded as the heavens, the latter as the earth of the Christian life. In calling upon. us first to love the Lord our God supremely, and then our neighbour as ourselves; likewise in asking us to pray first for the Divine glory, and then for our own and our neighbour's good, our Lord sets before us "a new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness;" first a new heavens, and then a new earth; first a new heavens in order that there may be a new earth; for it is only through the heavenly love that we can reach the earthly love and life to which our Saviour calls us.

And yet

how many are there who, though they do honestly try to live the Christian life, yet occupy themselves almost exclusively with the earthly part of it, only occasionally mounting up with wings as eagles, only now and then extending the horizon of their vision beyond the limited sphere of their personal and family interests. They dwell habitually in the lower regions; they only on rare occasions visit the heights.

It will of course be understood that it is only Christians who are called to set their hearts first on the cause of God; it is only those who have learned to say "Our Father," who are taught to make their first petition, "Hallowed be Thy name." The very first thing for a

sinner is, of course, to be "reconciled to God." To him Christianity must first be a personal matter, a personal coming to Christ for pardon and "newness of life." In this personal acceptance of Christ he learns his primary lesson; so that he is able to join with all who, like him, have been reconciled to God in saying, "Our Father, which art in heaven." But now he is a child of God; his sins have been forgiven. He still will need cleansing from the stains contracted in his pilgrimage; but he no longer needs to seek bare life as one who is "dead in trespasses and sins." He no longer needs to make his own personal salvation his first care; he may now enjoy

"A heart at leisure from itself."

Christ's now, by willing self-surrender, he may-nay, he will-forget himself, "deny himself," for his Redeemer's sake; and thus he will set his heart, above all other things, on the hallowing of the Divine name, the coming of the Divine kingdom, the doing of the Divine will on earth as it is in heaven.

But some may be inclined to question whether the

order of this prayer should be the order of Christian endeavour: "Is it not, after all, the true way to begin. with that which is easier, and proceed by degrees to that which is more difficult? and, inasmuch as it is a great deal easier to subordinate temporal to spiritual blessings, than to subordinate both to a desire for the Divine glory, is not that the more natural and the more practicable course which Christian people seem to be in the habit of taking? So long as we do not lose sight of the first half altogether, there surely cannot be any harm in putting our main strength into the second half until we have attained it; and after we have measurably attained it, after we have fairly learnt to put the spiritual before the temporal, then it will be time not only to give some place in our thoughts and lives to the first three petitions, but to try to give them the place of prominence which we acknowledge to be their proper place in a fully developed Christian life." Now all this would be reasonable enough if attainments in the Christian life were to be had on precisely the same conditions as attainments in other departments, scholarship, for instance. If it were simply a question of our native powers plus our own personal efforts, then it would be only reasonable to take the easier first, and postpone the more difficult for later and more mature effort. But it is not so. We cannot accomplish even the easiest part of it by our own efforts. We need the Holy Spirit to teach us even to cry "Abba, Father." We need the Holy Spirit to enable us to seek the higher in preference to the lower blessings for ourselves. And seeing that without the Holy Spirit nothing can be done, and with Him all can be accomplished, the question of relative ease or difficulty is not a serious element in the case, and certainly affords no sufficient reason for departing from the order our Lord has Himself marked

out for us. It is vain for us to enter on the struggle without the Holy Spirit; and with Him we need not fear to set before us the highest ideal. It is the very work of the Spirit to take of the things of Christ, and show them to us; and can any one suppose that He will be more willing to respond to our call if we invite Him to begin to help us in the second part of the Lord's Prayer, with the implication that if He only help us well through that, we shall then proceed to the first part of it? No, no; that is not the way to honour the Spirit; it is not the way to honour Christ. Let us take the ideal our Lord Himself has given us, in all its fulness, in all its grand proportions; and remembering His promise of the Holy Spirit to all who ask, and not forgetting that the Spirit is able and willing to "help our infirmities" in great things as well as small, let us by all means, from the very outset, aim at nothing short of a life which will embrace in it all the glory of the heavens, as well as all the gladness of the earth: which will put "Thou," "Thine," "Thee," in the first place; "we," "ours," us," in the second; while from beginning to end “I,” "mine," "me," pass out of sight,-lost in God in the first, merged in man in the second.

All

In proceeding now to look more closely into the heart of the prayer, it will of course be impossible to attempt anything like an exposition of the separate petitions. I propose to do is to bring out and enforce those considerations which will serve the main object before us, namely, to vindicate the claim of what may be called the missionary petitions to the first place in every Christian heart.

The illustration already used may help to such a comprehensive treatment as may suit our purpose. We have spoken

of the first three petitions as the "heavens" of the Lord's Prayer; but we must not forget that these heavens bend all around the earth, and touch it at every point, and that the interest of these petitions for us, and the possibility of a healthy and sustained enthusiasm on our part, will depend on our keeping this in mind. If we allow our thoughts. to wander away off into a distant heaven,-away off, as it were, into the cold ether of the interplanetary and interstellar spaces, there will be no warmth in our hearts and no life in our prayer. The need of this caution will appear when we consider that there has been a constant tendency to remove each of these three petitions from the range of the present and practical to that of the remote and impalpable.

In regard to the first petition, it has often been forgotten that it is the "Name" of God which is spoken of, and not God Himself; and hence a great deal that has been said and written in the old theologies as to making the glory of God the chief end of man has been unreal and intangible. When Christian people, guided by these representations, wished to test themselves on the question whether they were supremely desirous for the Divine glory, the test was apt to take the form of some severe abstraction, as, for instance, in the oft-raised question, "Have I such a supreme regard for the Divine glory that I would be willing to be lost for ever if that were to promote it?" Can anything be imagined more futile and unnatural than this?

The Name of God is that by which He has made Himself known to us, specially in the course of revelation; above all, the two great names of "Jehovah" in the Old Testament and "Jesus" in the New. As to the name "Jehovah," it has been rationalised away into the thinnest and coldest abstraction, through the influence of