LECTURE V.

Give us this day our daily bread.”

MATTHEW, VI. 11.

How majestic is the imagery of Scripture, when it presents to us our Maker and God, as feeding all the orders of his animate creation, and ministering continually what they as constantly need, for the sustentation of the life which He has bestowed upon them. "The eyes of all wait upon Thee, and Thou givest them their meat in due season: Thou openest Thine hand and satisfiest the desire of every living thing."* "He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which cry." The sea-gull winnowing the salt and wintry air along our coasts; the petrel twittering in the storm over the far blue waves of mid-ocean; and all the tribes that cleave the air, or traverse the deep paths of the seas, or rove our earth, look up to His daily vigilance and bounty, under the pressure of their daily necessities. To Him the roaring of the beast, and the chirping of the bird, and the buzzing of the insect, are but one vast symphony of supplication from + Psalm cxlvii. 9.

* Psalm cxlv. 15, 16.

the hosts which he feeds. To His capacious garners their successive generations have resorted, and yet those stores are not spent ; neither has the Heavenly Provider failed in his resources, nor have the expectant pensioners been left to famish.

To God, in this aspect of His government, the prayer now brings us. All the petitions which precede, and which compose the earlier half of the Lord's Prayer, respect the end for which man lives;-the glory, dominion, and service of his Creator. The later petitions, of which that before us is the opening one, and together making the latter half of the prayer, have reference to the means by which we live; the body by means of God's supplies of food; the soul by means of the pardon for sin, by the victory over temptation, and by the escape from evil in all its forms and all its degrees, which we implore and which God bestows.

Of the two portions into which the whole prayer thus resolves itself, the first half, beginning with the Father's throne in Heaven, comes down, by the steps of its several petitions, to man, as the servant of his Father on the earth. "Thy will be done in Earth as it is in Heaven." The second portion commences with 'man and his lower and corporeal needs on earth, and climbs upward, on its returning way to the skies, through supplications that respect, first, man's bodily, and then his spiritual wants, and implore his deliverance from all present and eternal evil. The Prayer becomes thus like an endless chain in our wells. Beginning in Heaven and reaching Earth, and then returning to Heaven again, it is seen binding together the throne