Why is it, then, that God requires of us to pray? The answer is a quite simple one. It is because God is our Father, and He wishes us to be trained in habits of conscious intercourse with Him. Therefore, just as many blessings which God wishes to give us are made dependent on our working for them, so many other blessings are made dependent on our regular and systematic asking. God wills to give them, but He wills to give them only if we ask Him; and this in order that the very necessity of continually holding intercourse with a personal God and making requests to Him may train us in the habit of realizing that we are sons of our heavenly Father. The wisdom of this provision is best realized if we reflect how easily, when the practice of prayer is abandoned, the sense of a personal relation to God fades out of our human life. We are to pray then not to inform God, but to train ourselves in habits of personal intercourse with our Father who is in heaven. CHAPTER VII THE LORD’S PRAYER OUR Lord is not satisfied with giving us abstract principles of prayer, but teaches us how to pray by giving us an example: “After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven,” &c. In regard to this great prayer, I would content myself with calling attention to the points of chief importance, and trying to explain some few difficulties, which lie in the separate clauses, and then very briefly indicating some of the principles which as a whole it enshrines. “Our Father which art in heaven.” The spirit of a prayer depends in great measure on whether the worshipper’s thought of God is true or false, adequate or inadequate. The Christian invokes God under the completest of all His titles, the title of Father, for “God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father.”[69] And we call Him the _Father which is in heaven_, not because He is far off us――for in the Kingdom of Christ heavenly and earthly things are mingled and we “are come unto the heavenly Jerusalem,”[70]――but because He is raised far above all the pollution and wilfulness and ignorance of man “as the heaven is higher than the earth.” So we invoke our Father, infinitely above us yet unspeakably near. And the first prayer we offer is: “Hallowed be thy name.”