will be found to reflect back ever new lights upon the oracles which He has given, and to produce new and irrefragable evidences, that the Maker of man's heart and the divine Orderer of man's history was the Framer of this petition. It proves the all-pervading Omniscience of its authorship, by so wondrously bending itself, with a divine pliability, to all man's new wants; and by its bringing within the compass of a few, brief sentences, not only the interests and necessities of a world, but the cravings and destinies of the race alike for Time and for Eternity.

As an instance that Time and Change only find new and outgushing richness in this utterance of our Redeemer, making it still a stream of fresh and living waters to our own age after the lapse of eighteen centuries, we may allude to two recent comments upon the Lord's Prayer, the one appearing in France, and the other in Great Britain. Coquerel, an eloquent Protestant preacher of Paris, and a member of the Constituent Assembly which shaped the last political constitution of that country, published not long since his discourses on this portion of our Lord's teachings,* with an evident bearing, throughout his remarks, upon the theories of social reform that have been so eagerly and boldly presented by some of the thinkers of his nation. Holding unhappily some views of vital religious doctrine, which Calvin and Beza, Claude and Dumoulin, the earlier glories of the French Protestants, would denounce as portentous and fatal heresies; he exerts himself against some of the social novelties of his age with zeal and energy, and whilst discussing the petition for daily bread has evidently Proudhon and other contemporary schemers in full and hostile survey. Himself an innovator in theology, as the early reformers would hold him, he shrinks appalled from some of the political and civil encroachments of the fierce and rugged theorists around him.

* "L'ORAISON DOMINICALE, Huit Sermons par Alhanase Coquerel. Paris. Cherbuliez. 1850."

On the other hand the Rev. F. D. Maurice, a scholar of the Established Church of England, attached probably rather to the party of Authority and Order than to that of Zeal and Reform, sympathizing more with those called generally the Orthodox High Churchmen than with those whose usual designation is the Evangelical party,-and holding besides his Professorship in King's College, London, the Lectureship of Lincoln's Inn, an appointment connecting him with the bar and bench of England, and one held before him by a Warburton and a Heber,has, notwithstanding all these bonds to the Established and the Ancient, in a recent volume of discourses on this same prayer,* manifested throughout a disposition to appreciate and meet, far as may be, the schemes and claims of those modern reformers who hold that Poverty and Labor now demand grave and comprehensive measures of relief. In an earlier book of much ability on the Kingdom of Christ, moulded probably with some reminiscences of Moehler's great work on Symbolism, he had endeavored to place the claims of Episcopacy and the Establishment on the one hand, and those of the various bodies holding aloft the standard of Nonconformity, on the other hand, in a position where each might better comprehend the arguments and wishes of the other. It was an endeavor to do in the interests of Episcopacy as against Nonconformity, what Moehler had sought to accomplish in behalf of Romanism, as against the various forms of Protestantism. The same traits show themselves in his more recent and briefer volume on the Lord's Prayer; but the party whose claims he, in this later work, at times parries, and at other times adopts and expounds under new and Christian forms of expression, is that of Social Reform. The British and the French thinker, then, writing apparently

* "THE LORD'S PRAYER. Nine Sermons preached in the Chapel of Lincoln's Inn, by Frederick Denison Maurice, M.A., Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn. London. Parker. 1848."

without any reference to the works each of the other, and with few or no doctrinal sympathies, show how this simple prayer of our Lord, given eighteen centuries ago to Jewish peasants, on a hill-side in Palestine, is regarded, in the two great nations of modern Europe, as shedding new and authoritative light, on the novel and startling controversies of a revolutionary age. And such indeed is its power, ancient but fresh, like the light streaming to-day anew, from the same sun which shone on that hill-side on the day when our Lord first gave this form of prayer. Successive generations may thus bask in the fresh showers of light continually poured from the same eternal Sun of Righteousness.

And as still new might and ever-freshening light are to be evolved from this, God's word, in the future; so is it impossible, in reviewing the past, to overvalue and exaggerate the amount of healing and restraining energy which this single prayer has already shed forth on the heart, the home, the sanctuary, the school, the nation and the race. How many a snare has it broken; how many a sorrow has it soothed; how many a gathering cloud of evil has it averted or scattered. Could we write the history of mankind, as it will by the Judge of all be read in the Last Day, how much of earth's freedom and order and peace, would be found to have distilled, through quiet and secret channels, from the fountain, full and exhaustless, of this single prayer. It has hampered the wickedness which it did not altogether curb; and it has nourished individual goodness and greatness in the eminence of which whole nations and ages have rejoiced.

What forming energy has gone forth from the single character of Washington upon the destinies of our own land and people, not only in the days of our Revolution, but through each succeeding year. He only who reads that heart which He himself has fashioned can fully and exactly define the various influences which served to mould the character of that eminent

patriot; yet every biographer has attributed much of what George Washington became, to the parental training and the personal traits of his mother. To Paulding, in his Life of Washington, we owe the knowledge of the fact that this Christian matron daily read to her household, in the youth of her son, the Contemplations of Sir Matthew Hale, the illustrious and Christian Judge. The volume is yet cherished in the family, as an heir-loom, and bears the marks of much use: and one of its Essays, "THE GOOD STEWARD," is regarded by the biographer, as having especially left its deep and indelible traces, on the principles and character of the youth whom God was rearing for such high destinies. And certainly, either by the direct influence of the book and its lessons on the son, or by their indirect effect upon him through that parent revering and daily consulting the book, the Christian jurist and statesman of Britain, seems, in many of his characteristic traits, to have reappeared in this the warrior and patriot to whom our own country gives such earnest and profound gratitude. The sobriety, the balanced judgment, the calm dignity, the watchful integrity shunning the appearance of evil, the tempered moderation, the controlling good sense, carried to a rare degree that made it mightier than what is commonly termed genius,-all were kindred traits, strongly developed in the character alike of the English and of the American worthy. In Washington's character, this seems among its strangest and rarest ornaments, its judicial serenity maintained amidst the fierce conflicts of a Revolution-the composure of the Areopagus carried into the struggles of Thermopyla.* Now the work of Hale, thus the household manual in the dwelling of the youthful Washing

"Calm, but stern; like one whom no compassion could weaken,
Neither could doubt deter, nor violent impulses alter:
Lord of his own resolves,-of his own heart absolute master."

SOUTHEY (of WASHINGTON) in his Vision of Judgment.

ton, contains a long, labored and minute series of Meditations on the Lord's Prayer. How much of the stern virtue that shone serenely over the troubled strifes of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, and over the shameless profligacy and general debasement of the restored Stuarts, came from the earnest study of that Prayer, only the Last Day can adequately show. We can see, from the space it occupies in Hale's volume, what share the supplication had in his habitual and most sacred recollections. We seem to recognize,-in his earnest importunate deprecation of the sins from which society held him singularly free, and in his urgent and minute supplications for all grace and for those especial excellencies, in which his age and land pronounced him to have most eminently attained, the secret of his immunity and his virtue. Is it fanciful or credulous to infer, that, directly or indirectly,-in his own acquaintance personally with the work, or in his inherited admiration of the author's character, our Washington derived his kindred excellencies from Hale; and that healing virtue thus streamed from the robes of the Saviour on the Mount, as He enunciated this form of supplication-streamed across wide oceans, and intervening centuries, into the heart and character and influence of him whom our people delight to hail as the Father of his country?

No human analysis can disintegrate from the virtue and freedom and prosperity of modern Christendom, the proportion and amount of it, which is distinctly owing to the influence of this single supplication.

With these views of the past and coming influence of this Divine composition, each Christian teacher may be allowed, again and again, to recall the attention of his flock to such a fountain, whose streams have this power from God of perpetual vitality, and roll forth through each tract of time, their all-healing and ever-freshening waters,-one source of that river which "maketh glad the city of God." W. R. W.