Another saying of Christ’s concerning prayer, not less fundamental is this:  “When ye pray, say, Our Father, which art in heaven.”  How essential to prayer is a right thought of God it can hardly be necessary to point out.  “When ye pray say——­” what?  All depends on how we fill in the blank.  Our thought of God determines the character of all our intercourse with Him.  If “God” is only the name which we give to the vast, unknown Power which lies behind the visible phenomena of the universe, if He is only a dim shadow projected by our own minds, or a collection of attributes whose names we have learned from the Catechism, our prayers will soon come to an end.  When Jesus prayed He said always “Father”; and the Father to whom He prayed, and whom He revealed, He it is to whom our prayers should be offered.

This is a matter the practical importance of which it would be hard to exaggerate.  Think, e.g., of the questions concerning prayer which would be answered straightway, had we but made our own Christ’s thought of God.  We are all familiar with the little problems about prayer with which some good people are wont to tease themselves and their friends and their ministers:  Is it right to pray for rain, for fine weather for the recovery of health, for the success of some temporal enterprize, and so forth?  How shall we meet questions of this sort?  Shall we draw a line and say, all things on this side of the line we may pray about, all things on that side of the line we may not pray about?  This will not help us.  Rather we must keep Christ’s great word before us:  “When ye pray, say, Father.”  There or nowhere is the answer to be found.  Just as every wise father seeks to train his child to make of him his confidant, to have no secrets from him, to trust him utterly, and in everything, so would God have us feel towards Him; as free, as frank, as unfettered, should our fellowship with Him be.  To put it under constraint, to fence it about with rules, would be to rob it of all that gives it worth, And, therefore, I cannot tell any man, and I do not want any man to tell me, what we may pray for, or what we may not pray for.  “When ye pray, say, Father;” and for the rest let your own heart teach you.  But if we are left thus free shall we not ask many things which we have no right to ask, which God cannot grant?  Undoubtedly we shall, just as a boy of five will ask many things that his father, because he loves him, must refuse.  Nevertheless, no wise father would wish to check the childish prattle.  There is nothing that he values more than just these frank, uncalculating confidences, for he knows that it is by means of them that the shaping hands of love can do their perfect work.  And the remedy for our mistakes in prayer is not a set of little man-made rules, telling us what to pray for and what not to pray for, but rather a deeper insight into, and a fuller understanding of, the glory and blessedness of the Divine Fatherhood.