with joy upon their
heads, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.'

Then shall this mighty prayer be answered, the prayer of God's children
in all ages, the prayer which He offers before the Throne who on earth
prayed, 'Not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that
Thou shouldest keep them from the evil'; the prayer which the
white-robed souls offer when they cry, 'How long, O Lord, how long?' the
prayer which, all unconsciously, the sobs, and cries, and sorrows of six
thousand years have been offering; the prayer which is every hour being
answered in hourly mercies, and multitudes of forgivenesses and gracious
guiding; the prayer which has been steadily tending towards its
fulfilment, through all the ages during which God's name has been
growing in men's love, and His will more and more obeyed, and His
kingdom more and more fully come; the prayer which will be at last
completely realised when all His children shall stand before His Throne
happy and good, and the noise of earth's evil shall sound only in the
ear of memory, like the murmur of some far-off sea heard from the sacred
mountain, or the remembrance of the tempest when all the winds are
still.

If our prayer is, 'Deliver us from evil,' our life's experience will be
that 'He delivered us from so great a death and will deliver,' our dying
word will be thanksgiving to 'the angel who delivered us from all evil,'
and our death will bring the full deliverance for which while here we
pray, and admit us into that region of unmingled good and blessing and
purity, whose distant brightness we, tossing on the unquiet sea, behold
from afar and long to possess. 'After this manner pray ye,' and to you
the promise will be blessedly fulfilled, 'Because he hath set his love
upon Me, therefore will I deliver him. I will set him on high, because
he hath known My name' (Ps. xci. 14).

'THINE IS THE KINGDOM'

'Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.
Amen.' MATT. vi. 13.

There is no reason to suppose that this doxology was spoken by Christ.
It does not occur in any of the oldest and most authoritative
manuscripts of Matthew's Gospel. It does not seem to have been known to
the earliest Christian writers. Long association has for us intertwined
the words inextricably with our Lord's Prayer, and it is a wound to
reverential feeling to strike out what so many generations have used in
their common supplications. No doubt this doxolo