best.

Something in your love for them makes you sure that you are not parted for ever. Your hearts refuse to believe that they have taken an eternal farewell of you. Their homegoing has made heaven more solid and homelike to you.

This petition should deeply stir the heart of the orphan and the fatherless. They, beyond all others, should cast themselves on the Fatherhood of God. In his book on "The Lord's Prayer," Dr Stanford gives a good story. Dr Jonas King was once addressing a school of little orphans.

"" How many of you have no father?" he asked. "Answer by holding up your hands."

Up went a forest of little hands.
"So you have no father?"

"No," they said.

"Now say the Lord's Prayer."

They began, "Our Father which art in heaven-"

"Stop, stop," said the doctor; "is that right?"

They began again, "Our Father'
"Stop again," he said.

"Did you say,

'Our Father?' Yes, you are right; you have a Father. I want to speak to you about Him."

He told them the story of the love of God.

The Lord's Prayer was not quite a mystery to these orphaned infants.

O God, send forth the Spirit of Thy Son into our hearts, so that we may ever say unto Thee, Abba, Father. Amen.

No. II

OUR FATHER WHICH ART

IN HEAVEN

(Continued)

LAY the emphasis now on the first and last

words in the petition: heaven and our. The prayer begins not with "my Father," but with our Father." You are to pray not as an only child, or a solitary child, or a selfish child, but as one of God's great family. Christ teaches you to own, not some far-off cousinship, but brotherhood and sisterhood with your kind. And you are to remember that your home and inheritance are in heaven. When you rightly use the first petition you thus pray as

I. A Child.

II. A Child from Home.
III. An Heir.

IV. A Brother.

Our last sermon was about the Child, and the Child from Home. We shall now study the suppliant as an Heir and a Brother.

Every Christian is a child of God, and this

The

is no empty title without an estate. Apostle argues, "if children, then heirs." The poorest Christian on earth can claim "an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away" (1 Peter i. 4). No estate is real that does not run into eternity. The Christian does not take his inheritance from others, nor can others take it from him. He is his own heir: no other can come after him.

Every child of God

This is a very wonderful truth, and we should often think about it. "" Thou art a man," says an old writer: "how great a name if thou knowest thyself." should remember that the very highest nobility belongs to him. He is very near of kin to God. He should be careful to do nothing unworthy of his nobility. A friend one day saw a young nobleman misbehaving at a railway station. An aged man went up to him and said, "You have forgotten that you are the representative of the noble house of

The youth was abashed and ceased from sullying a noble name. "Tell no lie," Darius said to his son, "for you may one day be king." What a life the Christian might live if he always acted now with a view to then! We greatly need that self-reverence which scorns to do any deed of shame. Nobility obliges the noble to live nobly. When tempted to do any doubtful thing, you should ask yourself,

"But is this worthy of one who wears the name of Christ ?" All the sons of God should bear themselves right nobly.

I want you to note well the first word in the Lord's Prayer-that little word our. No one is to sunder himself in prayer from his kind, as if he were the only inhabitant of a lighthouse on a lonely rock far out at sea. Nor is he to pray only for his own family, like that man who, we are told, used to pray, "God bless me and my wife, our John and his wife: we four, and no more. Amen." Nor is he to pray only for his own country. One German

writer on the Lord's Prayer quotes this verse from an old Socinian hymn-book: "Give rain and sunshine for Greiz, Schleiz, and Lobenstein; and if others also wish them, they can ask for themselves." If our hearts go up in true prayer to God, they must also go out in warm affection to all men. For " I have we not all one Father? Hath not one God created us?" Had we had many creators we might have had many castes. Every child of God should have the family-feeling. Being loved much, he loves much, and he loves many. It was said of a famous Scot that "he treated every man as if he were a bloodrelation." It is very plain that Christ wishes us to think of others every time we pray. That word "our" is also fitted to destroy