insight insures great accuracy, and imparts a priceless value to the work.

Few religious writers of our time are as widely known as the author of that heaven - blessed little tractate, Come to Jesus. Its readers have been numbered by the million in Britain and America, and among the various nationalities into whose languages it has been translated. This volume on the Lord's Prayer is written in the same lucid, vigorous, compact, and practical style. It is the very book to assist ministers of the gospel in their study of the Model Prayer; it is equally stimulating and quickening to private Christians in their quiet hours of meditation and devotion. A high authority has pronounced it "a mine of wealth to every minister," and another competent critic has styled it "the most scholarly and exhaustive monograph on our Lord's Prayer." The book is its own best eulogy. It needs not my humble words of commendation. But it is the grateful office of an almost lifelong friendship for me to stand at the doorway of the goodly mansion which my beloved brother has reared, and to invite others to enter in and inspect its treasures, and to bear away "things rare and profitable" to their own souls.

BROOKLYN, U.S.A., October 1889.

THE LORD'S PRAYER.

THE

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

HE prayer which our Lord delivered to the disciples as a model in their approaches to God, and which has been designated "The Lord's Prayer," is recorded by two Evangelists, and was spoken on two different occasions.

In the Sermon on the Mount our Lord was reproving the superstition which regarded the frequent iteration of mere words as acceptable with God, and the Pharisaism which made a public parade of prayer to obtain the praise of men. St. Luke records that at a later period of Christ's ministry, " As He was praying in a certain place, when He ceased, one of His disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples." This disciple may have forgotten the earlier instruction. Or he may have regarded it as too brief, or designed for the general multitude to whom it was addressed, and so asked for some counsel specially applicable to the inner circle

of the disciples, similar to some teaching so given to the more intimate friends and followers of the Baptist. But our Lord simply repeated the subject-matter of the same Divine model, as containing the essence of all we need to ask, and as showing the spirit and manner of all acceptable prayer. Matt. vi. 5-13;

Luke xi. 1-4.

On both occasions the reasonableness and duty of prayer were taken for granted; the Divine authority of our Lord being superadded to that of the older Revelation. Prayer is not simply one of many other features of religion; but is essential to its existence. 'There is not among all moral instincts a more universal, a more invincible one than prayer. The child betakes himself to it with ready docility; aged men return to it as a refuge against decay and isolation. Prayer rises spontaneously from young lips that can scarcely lisp the name of God, and from expiring ones that have scarcely strength left to pronounce it " (Guizot). Human nature is so constituted, that the acknowledgment of a superior Being by adoration and petition, harmonizes with our intellectual and moral instincts. "The widely-spread belief, that man may draw near to God, that he may transfer his thoughts and wishes to the mind of the Eternal, proclaims his sense of a Divine relationship between himself and God. As the magnetic needle points to the unseen pole, so the soul, before it is hardened or demagnetized by the rude blows of the world, will point to the home and heart of the Great Father" (H. R. Reynolds).