as he spoke to us." Delivered from the raging sea of evil, and safe on the land which sin can never defile, the saints of God will say as they never could on earth, "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory."

St Paul probably had this petition in his mind when he said, shortly before his death, "The Lord will deliver me from every evil work, and will save me unto His heavenly kingdom, to whom be the glory unto the ages of the ages. Amen."

L

No. XII

FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM, AND THE POWER, AND THE GLORY, FOR EVER

ΤΗ

OUR HALLELUJAH

HESE words are not found in the Revised Version. The learned say that they are not in the oldest manuscripts. One would be sorry to part with them; for the truth they teach is found often in the Bible, and they make a very natural and beautiful close. Without them one would feel that the Lord's Prayer had been cut off as with a knife; one would get a shock as when the brake is quickly put to the running train; the prayer would be like a road near the sea-shore ending in a sharp precipice. It is comely that prayer should rise to, and close with, praise. We feel strongly that evil should not be honoured with the last word. We like to finish with a glad Hallelujah and Amen. At least it is certain that the early Christians closed the Lord's Prayer

with these words, and we cannot err in imitating them.

These words contain an Argument, a Creed or Confession of Faith, and a Hallelujah. I use them as a reasoner, a believer, and an adorer. This will be our order—

A Creed; an Argument; and a Hallelujah.

I. OUR CREED.

:

A creed is what I believe it comes from the Latin word credo, I believe. This creed has three parts. I believe that the kingdom is God's, and that it is His for ever. It is the Kingdom, the one real Kingdom: no other deserves the name. Napoleon, when a prisoner on the lonely isle of St Helena, thought a great deal about Christ. He used to place His Kingdom alongside of other kingdoms. He mused sadly upon the kingdoms of Alexander the Great, Cæsar, etc. They were all built on force, and they all passed away. His own kingdom was one of the greatest the world had seen; but it had crumbled into ruins, and he, its king, was a wretched prisoner, always quarrelling with his keepers about petty trifles. Christ had used no force. His was an empire of truth and love; and millions were ready to die for Him. And how low the mighty Napoleon

was brought!

After his death, his heart was taken from his body to be embalmed. Napoleon's friends were eager to have the honour of guarding it. The Scotch doctor who had charge of Napoleon, took the heart into his bedroom, put it in a bason filled with water, covered it with a towel, locked the door, and kept the candle burning. He was waked by a splashing sound, and at once seized his revolver. Two or three rats were contending for the heart of the mightiest monarch of this century, whose footsteps seemed to shake the world. I have the best authority for this story.

And the Kingdom is God's for ever. I have read that, some forty years ago, there were fourteen discrowned kings in Europe. The Queen of the Sandwich Islands had two pictures of French kings-Louis Philippe and Napoleon III.-which were sent her as tokens of alliance with France. In each case the king was reigning when the picture was shipped, and discrowned before it reached the Sandwich Islands.

The pages of history are dotted over with the ruins of once mighty empires. Only that which is for ever can satisfy us—

"The Good, the True, the Pure, the Just.

Take the charm 'for ever' from them, and they

crumble into dust."

And Thine, O God, is the power: I believe and confess this. All I have said about the Kingdom can be said about the power of God. The Kingdom is just God's power in action and manifestation. All power is from God, and man's power at its best cannot be compared with His. How mad, then, it is for a perishing, sinful man to resist God! He must be the most miserable and foolish of men who opposes his will to God's, and rushes against the thick bosses of Jehovah's buckler. The bare idea of it should fill us with horror.

And I confess that Thine, O God, is the glory. But what is glory? I can hardly tell you. The word for it in the Bible means weight, substance, reality as opposed to all that is light and unreal and worthless. It is the eternally real as opposed to the seeming and the fleeting: it is the sum of all that is grand and wonderful. When I have used all the great words I know, I feel that there is something which towers far above them all; and that I call glory.

If God's is "the glory," then it follows that man's "chief end" must be "to glorify God." Having such a chief end, what a great thing it is to be a man, when a man knows himself and his God-given origin and end.

One day, more than a hundred years ago, a thoughtless young Scottish noblewoman