of Christ is in some respects the most precious relic of the
past. We have here the words which Christ addressed to God in the
critical hour of His life--the words in which He uttered the deepest
feeling and thought of His Spirit, clarified and concentrated by the
prospect of death. What a revelation it would be to us had we Christ's
prayers from His boyhood onwards! what a liturgy and promptuary of
devotion if we knew what He had desired from His early years--what He
had feared, what He had prayed against, what He had never ceased to hope
for; the things that one by one dropped out of His prayers, the things
that gradually grew into them; the persons He commended to the Father
and the manner of this commendation; His prayers for His mother, for
John, for Peter, for Lazarus, for Judas! But here we have a prayer
which, if it does not so abundantly satisfy pardonable curiosity, does
at least bring us into as sacred a presence. For even among the prayers
of Christ this stands by itself as that in which He gathered up the
retrospect of His past and surveyed the future of His Church; in which,
as if already dying, He solemnly presented to the Father Himself, His
work, and His people. Recognising the grandeur of the occasion, we may
be disposed to agree with Melanchthon, who, when giving his last
lecture shortly before His death, said: "There is no voice which has
ever been heard, either in heaven or in earth, more exalted, more holy,
more fruitful, more sublime, than this prayer offered up by the Son of
God Himself."

The prayer was the natural conclusion to the conversation which Jesus
and the disciples had been carrying on. And as the Eleven saw Him
lifting His eyes to heaven, as if the Father He addressed were visible,
they no doubt felt a security which had not been imparted by all His
promises. And when in after-life they spoke of Christ's intercession,
this instance of it must always have risen in memory and have formed all
their ideas of that part of the Redeemer's work. It has always been
believed that those who have loved and cared for us while on earth
continue to do so when through death they have passed nearer to the
Source of all love and goodness; this lively interest in us is supposed
to continue because it formed so material an element in their life here
below; and it was impossible that those who heard our Lord thus awfully
commending them to the Father should ever forget this earnest
consideration of their