This prayer—the Lord’s prayer as we commonly call it, though I often think it might be more appropriately called “The Disciples’ Prayer”—is a prayer we learned at our mother’s knee; it is hallowed for many of us by the fact that those who taught it to us at the first have exchanged prayer for praise: earth for heaven. Their lips have been silent for long years, but the prayer they taught us in our childhood, we repeat morning and evening still! Ah! how many times we have repeated it! From the very dawn of life this has been our prayer! We repeated it as children! We are repeating it to-day, as grown up men! Some of us are repeating it as old men! This prayer is one of the dear familiar things of life. But there is a danger in our very familiarity with this beautiful prayer. The peril is that by using it so often, it may become to us a mere form of words; the danger is that when we repeat it, we may do so mechanically—that we may say the Lord’s Prayer _without praying_. “Familiarity breeds contempt,” we say. People who live in the Alps think nothing of the splendid scenery that we English people go hundreds of miles to see. The dwellers in inland towns long for the time to come which will allow them to spend a brief holiday by the sea. They are fascinated, spell-bound by the changeful, mysterious, beautiful ocean. There are on the other hand, those of us who live in towns like this, who allow weeks and months to pass by without ever visiting the shore. There is ever this danger, that through our familiarity with them, the beautiful things around us should lose their beauty, and appear common-place in our eyes. That is the danger we are in with regard to this “Pearl of Prayers.” It is one of the familiar things of life, and our very familiarity with it may have dulled our sense of its beauty. Frequent usage may have dimmed our perception of its sweet simplicity, and its soaring spirituality. There is the danger of its becoming on our lips a mere form of words. There is the danger of its becoming, instead of a real, throbbing, living prayer, a cold, heartless, formal utterance.