I cannot help feeling that our modern life, with its insatiable appetite for wealth and its love of luxury, stands rebuked by this prayer. Men in these days desire not simply enough for their wants; they desire more than enough—more even than they can use. They struggle and strain that they may get a superfluity; and the result is poverty at one end of the social scale, and luxury, extravagance and waste at the other. Now, I am not prepared to say that to acquire wealth is wrong. But I am prepared to say this, and in saying it I base myself on our Lord’s own words, wealth and the luxury it buys are perilous to the best interests of the soul. Rome was strong and vigorous and happy while her people lived simply, and her noblest sons thought it no shame to share in humble manual labour. But when wealth and luxury entered in, when her populace, despising honest toil, lived on the doles of the Emperor, and her nobles wasted tens of thousands of pounds upon a single banquet, Rome became weak, rotten, wretched. On that hard, Roman world, disgust And secret loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated lust Made human life a hell. Wealth is as perilous as ever it was. Luxury still corrupts the soul. Plain living is most conducive to high thinking. It is easier always to be a Christian in a peasant’s hut than in Cæsar’s household. For the Christian life is a simple, spare—may I not say a severe life. Therefore Christ warned us against riches when he said, “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God.” Therefore here He teaches us to ask for simplest, barest necessaries—“Give us this day our daily bread.” Let me go on to notice further that in offering this prayer:—