Now let me pass on to ask, _How may we hallow God’s name?_ You remember the old commandment “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” Well, we must give a strict obedience to that old commandment if we are to hallow God’s name. There are men in our midst who can scarcely utter a sentence without dragging in the name of God. They interlard their speech with oaths, and blasphemously use the name of the sacred Majesty on High. Such men dishonour and degrade the Holy Name. But if we imagine that by abstaining from the vulgar and wicked habit of swearing we have “hallowed God’s name,” we are much mistaken. The Jews of old gave scrupulous obedience to the letter of the command, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” but they violated its spirit. They were so scrupulous that they would not even pronounce the sacred name. They passed it over in silence; they would never tread upon a piece of paper lying on the ground for fear the sacred name might be written upon it. And yet the Jew, while giving this strict literal obedience to the command, was all the while violating its spirit, and by his sin, his greed, his hypocrisy, was dishonouring that God whose name he feared to pronounce. And for the matter of that, there are people amongst us who attach, as the ancient Jews did, a superstitious reverence to the name, who treat it as if it were a charm; who pay an idolatrous worship to the mere word. I have been occasionally to services in the cathedrals and parish churches of our land, and I have noticed that the men and women who attend them will bow at “the name.” Now I am not prepared to say that act is wrong, but I am quite prepared to say that the tendency of all such practices is to make people imagine that God is to be honoured and worshipped by mere externalisms. The danger of such a practice is that of making people imagine they have “hallowed God’s name,” by bowing in church. Brethren, it is all a very pitiful delusion. What is the use of bowing at the name, if people go home to be selfish and unkind, or to their business to be hard and over-reaching; or into society to be gossips and tale-bearers? In spite of the outward respect they pay, such people dishonour God’s name, drag it through the mire, and make it the jest of blasphemers and fools. “Hallowing God’s name” does not mean bowing when that sacred name is pronounced: it means honouring the character of God, as that character has been made known to us in Jesus Christ. This is a prayer not simply for the man to pray who is fighting against the blaspheming habit, it is a prayer that the best of Christians may well utter. Well, how shall we “hallow God’s name?”