He is still teaching us that prayer sanctifies and makes hopeful and sweet our daily toil for daily bread. Forgiveness of sins is to be sought by prayer, and the great prayer plea we are to make for forgiveness is that we have forgiven all those who have sinned against us. It involves love for our enemies so far as to pray for them, to bless them and not curse them, and to pardon their offences against us whatever those offences may be. We are to pray, “Lead us not into temptation,” that is, that while we thus pray, the tempter and the temptation are to be watched against, resisted and prayed against. All these things He had laid down in this law of prayer, but many a simple lesson of comment, expansion, and expression He adds to His statute law. In this prayer He teaches His disciples, so familiar to thousands in this day who learned it at their mother’s knees in childhood, the words are so childlike that children find their instruction, edification and comfort in them as they kneel and pray. The most glowing mystic and the most careful thinker finds each his own language in these simple words of prayer. Beautiful and revered as these words are, they are our words for solace, help and learning. He led the way in prayer that we might follow His footsteps. Matchless leader in matchless praying! Lord, teach us to pray as Thou didst Thyself pray! How marked the contrast between the Sacerdotal Prayer and this “Lord’s Prayer,” this copy for praying He gave to His disciples as the first elements of prayer. How simple and childlike! No one has ever approached in composition a prayer so simple in its petitions and yet so comprehensive in all of its requests. How these simple elements of prayer as given by our Lord commend themselves to us! This prayer is for us as well as for those to whom it was first given. It is for the child in the A B C of prayer, and it is for the graduate of the highest institutions of learning. It is a personal prayer, reaching to all our needs and covering all our sins. It is the highest form of prayer for others. As the scholar can never in all his after studies or learning dispense with his A B C, and as the alphabet gives form, colour and expression to all after learning, impregnating all and grounding all, so the learner in Christ can never dispense with the Lord’s Prayer. But he may make it form the basis of his higher praying, this intercession for others in the Sacerdotal Prayer. The Lord’s Prayer is ours by our mother’s knee and fits us in all the stages of a joyous Christian life. The Sacerdotal Prayer is ours also in the stages and office of our royal priesthood as intercessors before God. Here we have oneness with God, deep spiritual unity, and unswerving loyalty to God, living and praying to glorify God. XI OUR LORD’S SACERDOTAL PRAYER