the day of
judgment. There is the revelation of the timeless depths of our Father's
heart; there is the prophecy of the furthest future for ourselves and
our brethren. No man can exhaust it. Every age may find in its simple
syllables lessons for their new perplexities and duties. It will not be
outgrown in heaven. But, thank God, we do not need to exhaust its
meaning in order to use it aright. Jesus interprets our prayers, and
many a dumb yearning, and many a broken sob, and many a passionate
fragment of a cry, and many an ignorant desire that may appear to us
very unlike His pattern for all ages, will be accepted by Him. He
inspires, presents and answers every prayer offered through Him to the
Father in heaven. He counts the poorest prayer to be 'after this
manner,' if it comes from a heart seeking the Father, owning its sin,
longing dimly for deliverance and purity, and hoping through its tears
in the great and loving tenderness of the Father in heaven who has sent
His Son, that through Him we might cry Abba, Father.

FASTING

'Moreover, when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad
countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear
unto men to fast. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
17. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy
face; 18. That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy
Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in secret,
shall reward thee openly.'--MATT. vi. 16-18.

Fasting has gone out of fashion now, but in Christ's time it went along
with almsgiving and prayers, as a recognised expression of a religious
life. The step from expression to ostentation is a short one, and the
triple repetition here of almost the same words in regard to each of the
three corruptions of religion, witnesses to our Lord's estimate of their
commonness. We are exposed to them just as the Pharisees of His day
were. If there is less fasting now than then, Christians still need to
take care that they do not get up a certain 'sad countenance' for the
sake of being seen of men, and because such is understood to be the
proper thing for a religious man. They have to take care, too, not to
parade the feelings, of which fasting used to be the expression, as, for
instance, a sense of their own sinfulness, and sorrow for the nation's
or the world's sins and sorrows. There are deep and sorrowful emotions
in every real Christian he