distance between earth and heaven if it be struck off from the living heart.” Secondly, notice the _directness_ of the prayer. How pointed the petitions are! There are no waste words! Here are a number of distinct and definite requests, each of which is stated clearly and plainly in a few simple words. There is no need for a cloud of words in prayer; there is no need of elaborate and highflown language; there is no need to beat about the bush. Let us be direct in our prayers! I am afraid we have got into the habit of using a kind of conventional language in prayer, as if God did not understand our common talk! The ideal prayer, however, is that which makes our request known to God with the same frankness and directness with which a child makes known his wants to his parents. Look at these petitions! Each of them is a prayer for a distinct and definite object. We want the same directness in our prayers to-day. As Matthew Henry quaintly puts it, “We should always strike at the white.” Then notice the _simplicity_ of the prayer. It is a prayer so simple that a little child can understand it! This is not a prayer reserved for the use of the learned, the cultured, the highly educated. This is a prayer everybody can understand. Wayfaring men, though fools, need not err therein. But its simplicity is not shallowness. People are apt to make mistakes. They think that profound which is simply turbid and muddy. They think, on the other hand, that which is pellucid and clear must of necessity be shallow. But the turbid pool is often very shallow, while those waters of crystal clearness contain depths no plummet can fathom. It is so with this prayer. It is simple, exquisitely simple, so simple that even a child can grasp its meaning. But what depths these simple sentences hide! Have we not been learning Sabbath by Sabbath something of the grandeur and sweep of the prayer? We have been trying during these past Sabbaths to explore the length and breadth, the height and depth of this prayer, but have you not felt, as the preacher has felt, that after all our exploring, there are yet undiscovered regions in this prayer? There’s a deep below the deep, and a height beyond the height, And our hearing is not hearing, and our seeing is not sight. Profundity is always a matter of idea, not of language. A man is not profound because he revels in polysyllables. The profoundest thought can be clothed in the simplest language. Shall I tell you the profoundest truth ever uttered by mortal man? Here it is, “God is love.” Yet the words are the simplest that language could afford. It is so exactly with this prayer. Beneath these simple sentences there are depths we have never fathomed. That is why this prayer will never be among the childish things which we can put away. Added years will only increase our sense of its sweep and depth and beauty.