1. The Lord’s Prayer is not one prayer among many, as you may have a number of collects for a number of different objects, and each particular collect is just one prayer among many. The Lord’s Prayer is rather the type and mould of all Christian prayer: “After this manner pray ye.” Understand the Lord’s Prayer, and you understand altogether how to pray as a Christian should. It is not really an exaggeration to say that the climax of Christian growth is to have thoroughly learned to say the Lord’s Prayer in the spirit of Him who first spoke it. And this has been clearly recognized in the use which the Church in all ages has made of the Lord’s Prayer. Among human compositions there are hardly any more beautiful than the liturgies in which Christians, at the altar, have approached the Father of their Lord in the pleading of His sacrifice. Now, almost all the ancient liturgies, both Eastern and Western, are so constructed that the point upon which each service converges is the saying of the Lord’s Prayer. That is the point up to which they climb. That is their central act; because the highest thing in the way of worship that the Christian can do is to say Christ’s own prayer in the freedom of that approach to God once won for him by the Son of Man. So, in our English Communion service, we put ourselves into the right frame of mind by saying the first Lord’s Prayer; and afterwards, in the power of His sacrifice and in the unity of His life communicated to us in His body and blood, we say again the Lord’s Prayer with its doxology as the highest point of our whole service. Once more, in the daily offices of morning and evening prayer the Lord’s Prayer occurs at the beginning, and again in the prayers after the Creed. It occurs at the beginning to put us into the right frame of mind for praying; and at the end it sums up our petitions――all that we have learned to pray for in the Psalms and lessons. And to leave out the second Lord’s Prayer, as is sometimes done by way of shortening the service, is surely to betray ignorance of the structure of the service and of the use of the Lord’s Prayer. This is indeed the way in which the Church, catching the spirit of her Lord, has used the Lord’s Prayer; and, as individuals, it is a great happiness and power for us when we have learned to use it freely. Whatever particular object we may want to pray for, we have never prayed for it aright till we have prayed for it in the words and spirit of the Lord’s Prayer. That, I repeat, is not one prayer among many. It covers all legitimate Christian praying, and indeed the saying of it affords the best test whether our wants of the moment can become a prayer offered “in the name of Christ.”