confidence may be firm that God will give us what we ask; yet how often
there is no vivid thought of Him filling the mind! How often our prayers
are offered to a mere name! How seldom through the cloud-wrack beneath
His feet do we see His face!

This absorbed contemplation is the necessary preliminary of all real
prayer, and there is a truth in the thought that such losing of self in
gazing on God is the highest form of prayer. We should feel as some
peasant come to court who stands on the threshold of the
presence-chamber, and forgetting his grievances and his embassy, gazes
entranced on the splendour and benignity of his sovereign.

Look, then, at this Name: what it expresses. It is not new. The Jews
dimly had it, and even Greek and other paganisms knew of a 'father of
Gods and men.' The name of Father carries with it primarily the idea of
the Source of life ('we also are His offspring'), and also, secondarily,
that of loving care.

How wonderful, how beautiful, that that earthly relation should find its
deepest reality in God! God be thanked that, 'like as a father pitieth
his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.'

But the true Christian idea of God's fatherhood is more than all this.
This is a prayer for disciples, for those who alone can really pray. All
men are God's children because all draw their life from Him, were made
in His image, and are objects of His love. But there is a fatherhood and
a sonship which are not universal, and for which another birth is
necessary. Its conditions are plainly laid down by the Evangelist: 'To
as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become sons of God,'
and by the Apostle, 'Ye are the children of God through faith in Christ
Jesus.'

We are made sons through Jesus. We are made sons by faith.

And now, how should this Fatherhood affect our prayers? We shall come
with hope and familiar confidence, for 'your heavenly Father knoweth
what things ye have need of.' Does a father love to have his children
about him? Does a child shrink from telling its wishes to a father? Also
we must bend our wills to His--to a Father.

Contrast that conception with the ideas of God which we are all tempted
to cherish, the slavish one which dwells upon the gulf between God and
man, with the cold deity of 'natural religion,' with the Epicurean
notion of Him which divorces Him from all living interest in His
creation.

Contrast it with the ghastly image which our conscien