Then again, there is here the grand idea that the whole creation will be bound into a unity by obedience to one will.  We and they now form one whole, because now we serve the one Lord.  And there comes a time when there shall be one Lord and His name one; when the omnipresent energy of His will in the physical universe shall be but a faint shadow of the universal dominion of His loving will in all His creatures.  Then indeed it will be true, ’Thou doest according to Thy will in the armies of heaven and the inhabitants of earth.’

What glorious harmonies will sound then, when all co-operate with God and with one another, and one purpose, and one will, and one love fills the whole creation!

The petition has a bearing of this upon the dreams of moralists and reformers.  They were true, they shall be more than fulfilled.  Earth will be no longer separated from heaven, but united with it, and from one extremity of creation to another will be no creature which does not obey and rejoice.

THE CRY FOR BREAD

     ’Give us this day our daily bread.’—­MATT. vi. 11.

What a contrast there is between the two consecutive petitions, Thy will be done, and Give us this day!  The one is so comprehensive, the other so narrow; the one loses self in the wide prospect of an obedient world, the other is engrossed with personal wants; the one rises to such a lofty, ideal height, the other is dragged down to the lowest animal wants.

And yet this apparent bathos is apparent only, and the fact that so narrow and earthly a petition has its place in the pattern of all prayer is full of instruction.  No less instructive is the place which it has.  A single word about that place may constitute a fitting introduction to our remarks now.  We have already seen how the former petitions constitute together a great whole.  That first part of the prayer expresses the desires which should ever be foremost in a good man’s soul—­those which have to do with God, and point to the advancement of His glory.  It begins, as I said, with the inward, and advances to the outward, as must ever be the law of progress in the sanctifying of human souls and life.  It begins with heaven and brings heaven down to earth, that earth may become like heaven, and both ’according well may make one music.’  Then, in the second part of the prayer we come to individual wants.  These have their legitimate place in our approaches to God.  Prayer is not merely communion with God, not merely reverent contemplation of His fatherly and holy name, though that should always be first and chiefest in it.  It is not merely the expression of absorbed contemplation, but of a nature that desires and is dependent.  Nor is it only the utterance of world-wide desires, and the expression of a being that has conquered self.  The perfection of man is not to have no desires, or to be petrified or absorbed into a state without a will and without