There are also many things God has revealed that He does not mean to give us, and there are laws of His ordering, spiritual and physical, that by revelation or natural investigation He has made known. For these things, then, or against these laws, we must not pray; we must not ask that God will violate His general laws in our private interest. But there is a great mass of things which lie in between these two regions of certainty. We do not know if it is God’s will that this or that person should recover from sickness, or this or that calamity should be averted. God is wiser than we are. We do not know whether it is God’s will that we should have the rain that is so necessary for our crops. There are things like these that lie in a region of uncertainty into which the intelligence of man cannot penetrate. So then as the object of prayer is not to bring the divine will down to the human, but to lift the human up into correspondence with the divine, for all these uncertain things we can pray indeed, but uncertainly――“If it be possible, let this or that come to pass; nevertheless, not my will, but Thine, be done.” CHAPTER VIII UNWORLDLINESS THE keynote of St. Matthew vi. is, as we have seen, this: that the true motive of the religious life in all its activities is simply the desire for divine approval. It owns one only master, God, whom it trusts with an absolute confidence. There results from this a complete freedom from the anxieties of the world. It is then an unworldly disposition, as the result of simplicity of motive, that our Lord proceeds to enjoin: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth and rust doth consume, and where thieves dig through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: for where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.” In the days when our Lord spoke these words people mostly preserved their money and other treasures by concealing it, as in many parts of Europe they do still. Thus the task of thieves was, in the main, to “dig through” into places in houses or fields where treasure was likely to be hidden. This is the meaning of our Lord’s metaphor. We are to lay up our store in heaven, where no thief can get at it, and where no natural process of corruption can affect it. Now heaven is God’s throne. It is where His will works centrally and peacefully; and the kingdom of the Christ is the kingdom of heaven, because, though a visible society in the world, God is there specially known and recognized, and His good will towards man is consequently at work with a special freedom and fullness.