Page:The Oriental Christ.djvu/90

be thy name" concentrates all the essence of worship, holy hymn, and pious utterance. "Thy kingdom come" involves the prayer and effort of all religious dispensations. "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" includes every aspiration after personal and social morality, and represents the practical application of the foregoing prayer. The entire teaching of faith, resignation, and asceticism, with which the Sermon on the Mount is full, finds expression in the simple, childlike petition of "Give us this day our daily bread." The model prayer condenses its universal magnitude into a pathetic, personal character, when the Father is asked to "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." And this culminates in the supplication, "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." These seven prayers fit into each other like component parts of a finished piece of mechanism. They suit all races, all ages, all stages of personal and national progress. From the grandest to the humblest aspirations of humanity, they embody all, they represent everything. Each one of them can be separated into ten thousand prayers, each prayer equally real, equally sweet. Yes, the Lord's Prayer was the essence of Christ's prayerfulness. It was his inner, intense life, poured