"And the glory forever." There were Pharisees too, proud and self-adoring, among Christ's hearers. They were zealous in proclaiming God's kingdom and power, but how did they defraud him of His glory. Their virtues were their own; their prayers and alms and services, were hoarded and reckoned as obligations that brought Heaven into debt. But God is jealous of His honor; and His glory, He will not give to another. And the system of faith,-no matter how decorous and respectable its adherents,-that is not based on the admission of God's claim to the entire glory of man's salvation, is a perilous and ruinous system. When Israel had just wrought the atrocious offence of forging and adoring the golden calf, and Moses interceded that Jehovah would not exterminate them, he pleaded the reproach that the heathen would fling on God's character; and when Joshua, with Achan in his camp, and his host routed by the men of Ai, sought God for counsel and help, he asked, "What wilt Thou do with thy Great Name?" Not Profanity only, but all Vain-glory, that may so cling even to the regenerate soul, and against which even Paul needed to be guarded by the thorn in the flesh-Vain-glory we say, as well as coarse Profanity, is here denounced and abjured. The victors of the world shall cast their crowns at the feet of the Lamb; and all glory and honor is ascribed to Him who sitteth upon the throne, by the inhabitants of the New Jerusalem. But to slay this self-glorying is probably one of the hardest, and one of the last, attainments of the Christian on earth. The mass of men perish by self-will, setting up their king

dom against God's. Others who escape that snare, and allow God to be the King, yet claim for themselves a spiritual power and independence which ruins them. But it is possible for us to evade this snare also, and yet, like Herod, to take to ourselves the homage that is God's, and incur the doom of the profane and smitten king. As Leighton has said: "The crowns and sceptres of earth hang at God's footstool;" and this is true not only of all political rulers, but of all forms of influence and honor and good amongst men. From God it came, and to Him its honors must return; or those who intercept the honor embezzle from their Sovereign and rob the exchequer of Heaven -an exchequer, the pillage of which never escaped detection and condemnation.

II. We have now reached the second branch of our subject, the beauty of the sentence forming our text, as constituting the close of the Lord's Prayer. It is observable, then, that the opening and the closing thought of the prayer fit into one another. Next after the appeal made to the Lord on high as our Father, comes the request, Hallowed be Thy Name. The closing branch of our text is an appeal for God to hear and grant, "for thine is the glory." The Name of God hallowed, and the glory of God extolled, are but variations of the same great truth. In this respect is seen, then, the ground of Leighton's remark, that prayer, "like the heavens, hath a circular motion," and that, beginning from God, it returns to God again. All devout aspirations and all celestial hopes in the heart and nature of man, if genuine and enduring,

have come first from the Heavens, whither they are finally to climb. Of them it may be said, that they resemble the waters as described by Solomon. The clouds are filled from the sea, and into that ocean their bursting treasures are again poured back; or if breaking on the land, they seek the rivers, and along those channels reach again their parent depths from whence they were first evaporated. If your closet seems a place of near and filial converse with God, it is not so much your devotion that has sought the Father, as the Father's glowing love that has won and kindled your devotion. "He first loved us.' The missionary, and pastor, and evangelist, the pious friend and the profitable volume, and the seasonable visit, and the word coming home to the heart, did you good but as God gave, and guided, and enforced them; and they will continue to bless and cheer you, only as you give to God again, in their use, the glory of their success. For the great object of our existence, and of all creation, is the provision as it were of mirrors raying back the effulgence of the Divine greatness, and the upspringing of flowers that shall bloom and glow in the rains of His mercy and the clear sunlight of His goodness. To know, and love, and to resemble, and to adore Him, is the great errand of my entrance on this wide Universe of being. Aught less than that, and lower than that, is treason to my own dignity; and an undue bedwarfment of the angelic proportions with which Eden clothed us, and to which Calvary restores us. But try by this simple test,-the glory of God,many of our plans, and pursuits, and how does their

pettiness and guiltiness start to light. Whereas, on the other hand, performed in His sight and for His sake, the menial service becomes ennobled ; and want, and pain, and shame, and death, incurred for His sake, lose their original nature, and shine in the radiance of the Being for whom they were borne, and to whom they are devoted.

2. Observe, again, in the structure of this closing sentence, how praise is interwoven with all acceptable prayer. To the King, glorious, and eternal, and mighty, sovereignty, and majesty, and power are to be forever ascribed. But the ascription is not made, as a disconnected doxology set apart from the prayer which precedes it. Because of this claim and right on God's part, all the supplications for pardon and aid and supply that have preceded are now afresh urged. And the attributes of the Deity are wrapped, if we may be forgiven the saying, around the humble oblation and petition, which we venture to lay on God's altar.

And is there not in this description of the Divine right to rule and shine,-to be honored and to be served, another of those three-fold intimations so common in the Scriptures, preparing the mind to receive the statements, elsewhere in Scripture explicitly made, of a mysterious and ineffable Trinity in the Divine Unity? When God by Moses taught Israel to say, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is ONE God," was it not inexplicable, except on the supposition of some such dread distinction in the Divine Unity, that the Name which this Moses was instructed so often to use

for God should be plural in its form-that so much should be said of the Angel of the Lord with whom and in whom the Lord was,-and that Psalms and Prophecies should paint the long promised and long awaited Messiah, as being clothed with so many dread and Divine prerogatives, and titles, and offices? In the Levitical benediction, there was this triplicity of form. In the song of angels, heard by Isaiah, when the Lord filled the temple, there was a trinė iteration of the "HOLY" with which His angels hailed and lauded the King and Saviour of Israel. And, here, we have the kingdom. Now in Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, in describing scenes beyond the Judgment, we have this reserved especially to the Father. We have the power. The New Testament speaks now of. the Son, as having made all things by the word of His power, and by the same word upholding them; and it also presents our Lord Jesus Christ as claiming after. his resurrection that all power in Heaven and earth is committed to His hands. We have the glory. Now glory is the splendor, light, and irradiance of that which is excellent. Is not the Holy Spirit made in Scripture the great channel of light? And if so, is it utterly unwarranted to think, that here may be the faint intimation of that great mystery, articulately and distinctly pronounced in the form and law of Christian baptism, which was to welcome disciples in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? And if such allusion to the Triune character of God were here intended, we see wherefore the order of the kingdom, power, and glory, are here what they are,