We have been summoned this evening by our King and by the Chief Pastor of our Church, to a Service of humble prayer and intercession to Almighty God on behalf of our Nation and Empire now engaged in war; and in the Form of Humble Prayer in which we have just joined there is an exhortation explaining and urging upon us the spirit in which that intercession should be made. In addressing you this evening I would draw special attention to one point in that exhortation. Before all else, we are told, we must remember that those who would receive good at the hands of God must go to Him in humility, with a due sense of their many faults and continual short-comings in His sight. In other words, a humble prayer must be before all else a prayer of humiliation. It is a principle which is impressed upon us every day in the Exhortation at the beginning of our prayers. “The Scripture,” we are told, “moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickednesses; and that we should not dissemble nor cloke them before the face of Almighty God our Heavenly Father; but confess them with a humble, lowly, penitent and obedient heart; to the end that we may obtain forgiveness of the same, by his infinite goodness and mercy,” and we are surely bound, on an occasion like this, to take to heart the words which follow, viz., that “although we ought at all times humbly to acknowledge our sins before God: yet ought we most chiefly so to do, when we assemble and meet together” as we do to-day, to implore His special mercy in the greatest crisis which our nation and Empire has ever had to encounter. If every morning and evening ought to waken in us a humble, lowly, and penitent confession of our sins, surely an hour when, as a whole Nation, we are seeking God’s merciful and gracious help calls for still deeper and humbler confession of our sins.