LECTURE II.

"Ballowed be thy Lame."

MATTHEW, VI. 9.

THE opening words of the prayer raise our thoughts to Heaven-our Father's abode and our proper Home. It is the central seat and the Metropolis of Holiness. Its very atmosphere is one of moral purity. Its inhabitants, although various in rank and endowment,some of them angels unconscious of a Fall, and others of them children of Adam, ransomed from a fall most profound and deplorable,—are all, however otherwise distinguished from each other, now alike in this one trait, that they are all and altogether, holy. Sinless themselves, they offer sinless praises to the Sinless One, and hymn together the name of Ineffable Sanctity.

Raised by the opening words of the Lord's Prayer, as the soul is, to the verge of this land of celestial purity, the words which next follow that opening clause, and which form our text, are a prayer in which the soul inhales seemingly from Paradise its atmosphere of holiness, and takes up for Earth the burden and re

sponse of Heaven's eternal anthem, "Hallowed be thy Name." To hallow is to treat as holy; or purely to worship and purely to serve. But fettered as in our dark

world we are with all unholiness, does not our innate and universal depravity make the prayer a contradiction? Is not the mere passage through our unclean lips of that name of such tremendous purity, a contamination of its spotlessness? Can the Sinless brook even the vows, imperfect and defiled, of the sinful? Do we not desecrate and dishallow, so to speak, this the theme of Heaven, by our attempts to stammer it? Like the white lily cropt by the collier's begrimed hand,—a flower soiled in the very gathering of it, does not our moral unfitness profane, as we pronounce it, a Name so august and holy? As by the contrast between our work and ourselves, and in the flagrant opposition between the theme and the worshipper, we are humbled. The opening of the Lord's Prayer, like the opening of the Beatitudes, preaches penitence and humility. Do the Beatitudes, before all things else, require us to be poor in spirit; so also does this petition of our Lord's Prayer. A prayer for holiness in God's service, is virtually a protest against our own prevalent unholiness, by nature, and by practice as well. With earnest supplication, then, for that preparation which in ourselves we find not, let us now

I. Examine the terms of the prayer;

II. Consider the sins of act and thought this petition condemns in us; and,

III. The duties to which it pledges us.

I. To implore that God's name may be hallowed is

to ask that it may be treated with due reverence, as befits the holy. In Heaven it is so treated. When Isaiah saw in God's own temple a vision of the Heavenly Throne, and its ministering angels, these attendant spirits responded to each other in sacred rapture: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory."* From all pure and sinless worlds comes back a repetition of the strain. But from our earth the echo was broken off by the Fall. We have in the apostle's language, sinned, "and come short of His glory." We start aside from that great end and aim of our being-the Divine glory-for which we were created. Whatever else of wisdom and strength the Fall left, yet in some degree remaining in and adhering to our nature, holiness was the element of human character that was most fatally and entirely destroyed. Ourselves, thus become both unwilling and unfit to praise Him, we sought to advance Man's name to the priority and authority from which we would fain thrust aside God's. The Fall was an attempt to dethrone the Creator and Sovereign, by the enthronization and the apotheosis of self.

But true holiness we had lost irremediably in the attempt thus to wrong our Father, and to deify ourselves. For holiness is entire purity,-the absence of all sin. And our rivalry of God was itself the very sum of sin. Now, if one attribute of the Most High could be especially dear to his nature, it would seem to be His holiness. To Israel, Jehovah proclaimed himself as 66 THE HOLY ONE of Israel;" and in the apRomans iii. 23.

* Isaiah vi. 3.

pellation selected to honor the Third Person in the adorable Trinity, the Divine Spirit is called not the Mighty, not the Wise, not the High, not the Gracious, -but the HOLY SPIRIT. So in the Atonement, the crowning manifestation of the Divine perfections, the scheme was intended especially to advance the claims of Holiness. Of Holiness, Justice or Righteousness is an indispensable and a prominent element. The Cross of Christ was intended to show God just in making man again just; to vindicate the Holiness as well as to commend the Mercy of Heaven; to remove the unholiness of man, and to fit him by the redemption and regeneration for the stainless purity of the world above, which he had forfeited. And this attribute of the Divine Nature, it is also, that most alarms man. We shrink from death because we then instinctively expect to be brought nearer to God; and in the sense of our moral dissimilitude we tremble to

bring our own sinfulness before His eyes, too pure to look upon iniquity. Upon Holiness, then, God lays the most earnest stress in the title He assumes, and in the atonement He devises; and upon holiness man may well ponder, since the Fall lost it; and on the approach of death it is his loss of this which overcasts the eternal world, and makes the expected vision of God one of terror and vengeance; 66 a fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation that shall devour the adversaries."

But what is God's Name? Amongst mankind, the name is that by which we distinguish and more or less perfectly describe each other. It is a man's