of supplication. As to the early Christians, we find one of the first of the Latin Fathers stating explicitly, that the leader in the Christian assemblies was accustomed to pray according to his capacity. Each evangelist and pastor of those days, according to the measure of his personal endowments and graces, poured out before God the expression of their common wants for himself and the flock he led. And useful as it is, for certain purposes of private edification, to study the recorded prayers of such men as Bishops Andrewes and Ken, of the Puritan Baxter, or of the Nonconformists Matthew Henry, and Philip Doddridge, the regular use of another's form of words to express our personal needs, seems always to tend towards formalism. The form lacks pliancy, and freshness, and adaptation. The practice seems again, in the multiplication and imposition of such forms, to tend to that very evil of which Christ here warns us-the "vain repetitions" into which superstition, both within and without the pale of the Christian Church, seems so naturally to run. Had Christ, again, purposed to make this the liturgical law of all praying assemblies, would he not, in prospect of its use by the Christian Church, have added to it the plea that it should be heard in his the Mediator's Name? At a later day he taught his disciples that thereafter all their requests must be based on the one pleading of His merits, and on the single intercession of Himself as the effectual Advocate: "Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name he will give it you."* Now,

* John xvi. 23.

the Lord's Prayer lacking such clause of commendation to the Father, by appeal fetched from the name and work of the Son, can scarce have been intended as the authoritative and enduring mould of prayer to the Church of Christ in all times. But, again, if Christ intended to make the prayers of his Church in all times a ritual and settled form, by what right have we any other forms of supplication than those of inspired teachers? We receive religious ordinances from Christ's Scriptures and apostles only; why take our liturgy, if this too were the proper and apostolic law of the Church, from authority later and lower than that of apostolic times and apostolic men? Say you, it is good to pray with the Chrysostoms or Ambroses, the Gregorys and Bernards, the Fathers and confessors of primitive or mediæval Christianity? But is it not yet better to pray with the Spirit that animated them, and not them only, but who aided the confessors and saints worshipping in the Jewish temple, or offering unto God sacrifices and supplications under the still earlier and patriarchal dispensation?

Christ, as we suppose, gave it rather as a specimen of prayer, such as He would have us habitually present, than as an imperishable mould into which all pious feeling and utterance must be compressed. It shows singular richness and comprehensive brevity. It puts into a striking light the relative worth of heavenly and earthly good, making our request even for the daily bread but one out of many petitions ;not the first, as if the most momentous,-not the

last, as if the most urgent and longest remembered, but enclosed and enwrapped, as it were, in petitions that referred to spiritual things, to the growth of God's kingdom, and the overthrow of Satan's tyranny. The order, again, in which its desires are ranged, teaches us that man's needs are never to take precedency of God's rights. Its earlier petitions are still of the Maker and the Sovereign and the God;-THY name-THY kingdom-and THY will. Then, when these have been dwelt upon, come as in their train, man's wants and askings;-OUR bread, OUR trespasses, and our temptations, and our deliverance. The Fall was an inversion of Heaven's order. It put the creature first, and the Creator last. In this, as in the other teachings of Christ, the order of Truth and Nature, and God is restored; man's insane decree for the dethronement of Jehovah is set aside, and the Greater takes rank of the lesser, and man's needs come in as the corollary of the restitution of God's rights. The heirs walk in the Father's train, and share in the conquests of the Avenger and Ransomer.

At this time we ask you to consider but the opening invocation. It lifts upwards the child's brow, and claims in Heaven and in the King of that country a filial interest. We may, to gather more clearly its blessed lessons, dwell upon the Parentage, "Our FATHER;" the brotherhood, "OUR Father;" and the Home, "Our Father WHICH ART IN HEAVEN :" or, in other words, the text may be regarded as grouping together the three principles which settle man's just relations to this and to the next world:

I. The FILIAL; he sees in the Most High a Father: II. The FRATERNAL; he comes not with his private needs and vows alone, but with those of his race and brotherhood, "Our Father:" And

III. The CELESTIAL; Though we are now of the earth, and attached to it by these mortal and terrene bodies, we are not originally from it, nor were we made to be eternally upon it. We are of Heaven, and for Heaven; for there and not here our Father is, and where He is our true HOME is.

I. In a certain sense, then, all men, the heathen and the sinner, no less than the regenerate disciple of the Saviour, may call God their Heavenly Parent. He is such, as their Creator. To him they owe the powers of body and mind which they possess; and His fiat fixed the age in the world's history, as well as the country and the household in which they should be born. And again, in His daily and incessant care for them, as revealing itself in the revolving seasons, in the falling showers, and the springing harvests,in the times of prosperity or calamity, enfranchisement or captivity, that pass over the nations,-His fatherly care and Providence are keeping ward over them, as does no mother over her cradled child,- -as does no doting father over the Joseph or the Absalom who is the light of that father's eyes. He is thus "The Father of our spirits." The family and the tribe, must at last trace back their pedigree to the garden of Eden: and human life began in the plastic hand, that also moulded and shot along their heavenly orbits the starry worlds. Paul therefore quoted to the

heathens of Athens the saying of one of their own Gentile poets: "We are his offspring." More really, than it can be said of our earthly progenitors, God is our Father.

But we have not retained, undiluted and uncontaminated, the original and divine stock. We are by our own fatal choice prodigals and exiles from the Father's home. Whilst even Paganism kept partial and fragmentary traces of the great truth that God is. our Father, human depravity and Satanic delusion have done all in their power to efface the genealogy, and to renounce the heritage and to transfer to another, and that other an usurper, the filial allegiance. The Jews were told by Christ that they were of their father the Devil. The whole system of Revelation and Religion is an orderly scheme, manifesting itself in several stages or dispensations, for the bringing back of the wanderers and outcasts. And as in the early stages of the life of each of us, the child may look upon the father and his stern authority with something of distrust, and whilst remaining yet but a child-incapable of large views, and of being affected by long delayed promises or long deferred punishments,―needs prompt and tangible rewards and chastisements; so, in the Jewish dispensation,the childhood of the Church of God,-the blessings of obedience and the retributions of disobedience were more temporal and immediate in their character than now. And then, too, the Church looked on God, as it were, rather in the stern character of the Legislator and the Lord, than in the winning relation of the