2. I say “in the name of Christ.” The Lord’s Prayer is the great prayer in His name. You know how many people have a very strangely childish notion, that praying in the name of Christ means simply the addition of the words “through Jesus Christ our Lord” at the end of their prayers. But depend upon it they do not by adding these words, or any words, bring it about that their prayers should be in the name of Christ. To pray in the name of Christ means to pray in such a way as represents Christ. The representative always must speak in the spirit and meaning of those for whom he speaks. If Christ is our representative, that must be because He speaks our wishes, or what we ought to make our wishes; and if we are to pray in the name of Christ, that means that we are, however far off, expressing His wishes and intentions. Therefore, as this Lord’s Prayer represents profoundly and perfectly the spirit of Him who first spoke it, and who taught it to His Church, it follows that it is, beyond all other prayers, the prayer in Christ’s name. Do you then want to know whether this or that thing can be prayed for in Christ’s name? The answer is to be found in another question, Can it be legitimately covered by the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer? 3. The knowing and saying of the Lord’s Prayer, as the prayer in Christ’s name, was in the early Church regarded as being, like the knowing and saying of the Creed, the privilege of those only who were members of the Christian family. It was the prayer of the family because of its first words, “Our Father.” The Christian creed, we know, would teach us to believe that God is the father of all men, and that He wills all men to realize their sonship. They cannot reach true manhood till they have come to know themselves to be, and to realize what is involved in being, sons of God. But since sin has separated men from God, it is through Christ and by the partaking of His Spirit that they enter or re-enter into the privileges of sonship. Thus the right of calling upon God as “Our Father” was believed to have come with the coming of the gift of the Holy Ghost: “God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” We are apt to have rather “free and easy” notions of the divine fatherhood. And it is important to be reminded that to call God our Father, we must ourselves be sons, and it is they who are led by the Spirit, they and they only, that are the sons of God. This Lord’s Prayer then is the prayer of the great Christian family; the prayer of the whole Catholic Church; the prayer which, though it may be spoken by a single member in a quiet corner, yet is instinct with the aspirations and needs and wants of all that great society which represents all nations and kindreds and peoples and tongues in this world and in that which lies beyond the grave.