“For an ye heard a music, like enow They are building still, seeing the city is built To music, therefore never built at all And therefore built forever.” In a plain word, it is the total task of humanity through the ages. It is the embodiment in a temporal order of the eternal purpose. It is the weaving in concrete figure and color of the Divine pattern. It is the slow and somewhat painful work of making an actual Divine society out of this rather stubborn and unpromising potential material. But it is our main business, and this prayer is the girding of the loins for the sublime task of helping God make His world. “Man as yet is being made, and e’er the crowning age of ages, Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape? All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade, Prophet eyes may catch a glory, slowly gaining on the shade, Till the people all are one and all their voices blend in a choric Hallelujah to the Maker, ‘It is finished; man is made.’” Fellow laborers with God in truth we are. Prayer ends in labor and labor ends in prayer. But it is not a cry for miracle. It is an inward effort at co-operation. There is a beautiful mingling of the great and the little, the cosmic and the personal. The universal sweep of Divine ends does not swallow up, or miss, the needs of the concrete individual. While the spiritual universe is building, men must have daily bread and they must constantly face the actual present with its routine and monotony. Here again prayer is no miraculous method of turning stones into bread. It is no easy substitute for toil. It is the joyous insight that in the avenues of daily toil, God and man are co-operating and that in very truth the bread for the day is as much God given as it is won by the sweat of brow. The recently discovered “saying of Jesus” best interprets this prayer. “Wherever any man raises a stone or splits wood, there am I.” He consecrates honest toil.