And what is this conception? It is the recognition of kinship. It is the conviction that the spiritual life in man is of the same nature as the spiritual life in God. The child's kinship to the parent involves the natural inheritance of capacity and destiny. "If children," says St. Paul, "then heirs, heirs of God, and {206} joint heirs with Christ." "Because we are sons we cry, Abba, Father." We are not Greek philosophers interpreting the causes of nature or the world of ideas; we are not Hebrew prophets representing a sacred nation; we are children, with the rights and gifts of children, and the assurance of a father's confidence and love. All this great promise the humblest Christian claims when he begins to pray the Lord's Prayer. He says, "I am not a brute, I am not a clod, I am a partaker of the Divine nature; I claim the promise of a child. And that sense of kinship summons me to my best. I pray as my Father's son, and as his son I bear a name which must not be stained. _Noblesse oblige_. There are some things which I cannot degrade myself to do because my position forbids them. There are some things to which I could not attain of myself, but which are made possible to me as my Father's son. I accept the unearned privilege of my descent; I claim the great inheritance of the kinship of God, and out of my self-distrust and weakness I turn to self-respect and strength, when I pray: 'Our Father.'" {207} LXXXIII THE LORD'S PRAYER, IV HALLOWED BE THY NAME _Exodus_ xx. 1-7. I suppose that to many a reader the prayer: "Holy be Thy name," means little more than: "Let me not be profane; help me to keep myself from blasphemy." But it is not likely that Jesus began his prayer with any such elementary desire as this; or that our first prayer need be only a prayer to be kept from irreverence. The name of God to the Hebrews was much more than a title. His name represented all His ways of revelation. The Hebrews did not speak the name of God. It was a word too sacred for utterance. Thus the man who begins the Lord's Prayer in that Hebrew spirit first summons to his thought the things which are the most sacred in the world to him, the thoughts and purposes which stand to him for God; the associations, memories, and ideals which make life holy, and asks that these may lead him into his own prayer. {208} What he says is this: "My Father, and the Father of all other souls, renew within me my most sacred thoughts and all the holy associations which are to me the symbol of Thyself. Give to me a sense of the sanctity of the world. Set me in the right mood of prayer. And as I thus reverently look out on Thy varied ways of revelation and of righteousness, help me to bring my own spirit into this unity with Thyself, to make a part of Thy holy world, and humbly to begin my prayer by hallowing Thy name." {209} LXXXIV THE LORD'S PRAYER, V THY KINGDOM COME _Luke_ xvii. 21.