The so-called "Lord's Prayer" is commonly accepted as summarising His doctrine relating[132] to the right rendering of prayer, and offers a remarkable illustration of that combined specific petition and spiritual acquiescence which is characteristic of His own employment of prayer. In His dual capacity of reformer of a corrupted religious symbolism and innovator of new esoteric ideas, He sought to cultivate a new order from the old, not by grafting upon past habit and tradition the bud of an extraneous growth, but by inviting the co-operation of the free-will of men with the working of the natural laws of development, perceived by Him to offer a means of attaining to a higher plane of spiritual consciousness. When He told His disciples that "All things whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive," He tacitly acknowledged the value of specific petitionary prayer, the right employment of which we know to be capable of providing an educational basis for the attaining of higher ideas of the relation between things material and things spiritual. [133] But His advocacy of all such specific petition was accompanied by a prefatory acknowledgment of God as the Father of man, the natural expression of His sense of union with the supreme Spirit and Source of Life. On the occasion of His own prayer before His betrayal, we find an expression both of His physical and spiritual desires. The man prays that suffering may be averted from him, while the spirit voices its longing to conform to God's Will and thus to obtain perfect union with the Spirit of Life in him and over him. "Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt" (St Mark xiv. 36). Is not this acknowledgment of the spiritual fatherhood of God, which here prefaces Christ's own employment of prayer, as well as His recommended form for the use of His disciples, another expression of the conception of God as the supreme Spirit of Life, manifested through love, and attested by the Spirit of[134] Truth, which finds representation in His words and deeds and in His rite of communion? Now, if we assume men's ideas of heaven and hell to be respectively the imagined realisation of desire and the compendium of fear, of a degree and kind consistent with their physical and spiritual evolution, and forming the basis of their prayer to God, an appreciation of the means and end of prayer as advocated by Christ should in some measure reveal His ideas on the subject of human immortality. The keynote of His reported teaching on prayer is that of union with the Will of God which, held by Him to be the true end of all attempted spiritual correspondence with God, becomes at once the foundation of and the justification for the Christian's hope of immortality.