for the moment are bound up in
his. He thinks of those he loves and says: "Our Father." He sets
himself right with those he does not love, reconciles himself with his
brother, and says: "Our Father." He joins himself with the whole great
company of those who have said this prayer in all the ages, and have
found peace {204} in it, and with that great sense of companionship the
solitude of his own experience is banished, and he is compassed about
with a cloud of witnesses, living and dead, as he bends alone, and in
his half-whispered prayer begins to say: "Our Father."

{205}

LXXXII

THE LORD'S PRAYER, III

FATHER AND SON

_Galatians_ iii. 26; iv. 6.

The fatherhood of God has become so familiar a phrase that we hardly
realize what a revolution of thought it represents. In the whole Old
Testament, so the scholars say, God is spoken of but seven times as
Father; five times as Father of the Hebrew people, once to David as the
father of his son Solomon, and once as a prediction that sometime men
would thus pray. And so when Jesus at the beginning of his prayer
says: "After this manner pray, Our Father," he is opening the door into
a new conception of God's relation to man.

And what is this conception? It is the recognition of kinship. It is
the conviction that the spiritual life in man is of the same nature as
the spiritual life in God. The child's kinship to the parent involves
the natural inheritance of capacity and destiny. "If children," says
St. Paul, "then heirs, heirs of God, and {206} joint heirs with
Christ." "Because we are sons we cry, Abba, Father." We are not Greek
philosophers interpreting the causes of nature or the world of ideas;
we are not Hebrew prophets representing a sacred nation; we are
children, with the rights and gifts of children, and the assurance of a
father's confidence and love. All this great promise the humblest
Christian claims when he begins to pray the Lord's Prayer. He says, "I
am not a brute, I am not a clod, I am a partaker of the Divine nature;
I claim the promise of a child. And that sense of kinship summons me
to my best. I pray as my Father's son, and as his son I bear a name
which must not be stained. _Noblesse oblige_. There are some things
which I cannot degrade myself to do because my position forbids them.
There are some things to which I could not attain of myself, but which
are made possible to me as my Father's son. I accept the unearned
p