The next best thing to saying a new thing, is to say an old thing in a new way. Originality consists not so much in discovering new truth, as in making old truth real and vital. The painter does not invent the beauty of nature which he depicts on his canvas, he simply brings it out and makes it visible. “I never see the kind of things you paint in your pictures,” said a lady one day to Turner, the great artist. “Don’t you wish you did, madam?” was the painter’s reply, The fault was in the lady’s vision. The artist saw beauties in nature which were missed and unheeded by the crowd, and painted them for us on his glowing canvases. The preacher sees wonders and glories in old and familiar things—glories missed or unheeded perhaps by those who have less time to read and ponder this grand old book. It is his business to bring them out, to show to his people the peerless beauty there is even in the most common and familiar things. Buttercups and daisies are common little flowers. They cover our fields. They carpet our meadows. We cannot take a walk in the fields in summer without treading hundreds of them under foot. They are so cheap and common that no one ever thinks of making a posy of daisies, unless it be our children, and they often enough fling the little flowers away before they reach their homes. Yet there is beauty in the daisy, and a glory in the buttercup. It is only familiarity that has made us blind. We should think them beautiful perhaps if they were as rare as orchids. And even as it is, we need only listen to a lover of flowers as he describes to us the delicacy and beauty of the daisy and the buttercup, to realise that even these—the commonest flowers that bloom—reveal something of the glory of God. Probably there is no form of words so absolutely and universally familiar as the Lord’s Prayer. I would like, if I can, to reveal to you some of its wonder, and beauty, and glory. There are, in this old familiar prayer, heights we have never scaled, depths we have never sounded. I want, if I can, to help you to realise its meaning, to feel its power, to grasp the sweep of its demands, so that this—the most familiar of all prayers—may be on our lips, fresh, real, vital; so that we may pray, not with the lips only, but with the understanding also, so that when we use these sacred words, whether it be in public or in private, we may not simply repeat the Lord’s Prayer, but really and truly _pray_. To bring out the full meaning of this familiar prayer, to illustrate its truths, to point out the demands it makes—that is the aim I have set before myself in this series of expositions which I purpose to deliver.