I. _A Confession of Need._ “Teach us to pray.” We ask the question sometimes, “Why do men pray?” Why do men pray! We might just as well ask, “Why does the nightingale sing? Why does the eagle soar into the boundless blue?” The nightingale sings because it was made to sing; the eagle soars away because its pinions were made for flight, and man prays because he was made for prayer. “Teach us to pray.” That is just the cry of men who must have their instincts satisfied. Man was made to pray. This is the cry that gives expression to the necessity of his nature. “Lord, teach us to pray.” Let me remind you that this is not a need which Christianity has created. Oh, no! the need is in the very make and constitution of a man. Christ only satisfied the need. Prayer is as old as man himself. The first man is far removed from us; in outward circumstances we are utterly unlike him, but we are like him in this respect, in our need of prayer. Society to-day is very different from the primitive simplicity of society in the time of the patriarchs; but we are like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in this respect—we all pray. The Bible is a book of prayers. It is the great prayer-book of the world. All the prayers in it are not on the same spiritual level. In many you will find much that is mistaken. But there they are—the prayers of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, Elijah, Hezekiah—all bearing witness to the same need, the same instinct. And I will not confine what I am saying to the men who are mentioned in the Bible. This sense of need is universal. God made man for Himself, and wherever you find man you find his heart and flesh cry out for the living God. The African who worships his fetish, the Hindoo who prostrates himself before his idol, even those poor, benighted people who do their praying by machinery—all these by their acts bear witness to the universal need. Indeed, it is this sense of need that makes the wide world one. When an infant is in need of anything it cries, and the cry of the little one is its prayer. When we men are in need of anything we _pray_; we may pray in a hundred different ways; we may utter no spoken word, but pray we must. In this respect, men the whole world over are the same. North and south, east and west, whereever you find man, you find him with this instinct for God, under this necessity to pray. It was because these twelve disciples felt that necessity that they made this request eighteen hundred years ago to the Man who was best able to answer it, “Lord, teach us to pray.”