lla rhysai hemas apo tou
ponerou; hoti sou estin he basileia, kai he dynamis, kai he doxa, eis
tous aionas. Amen.]

_Et ne nos inducas in tentationem; sed libera nos a malo; quia tuum est
regnum, potentia, et gloria in sceeula sceculorum. Amen._

BRANTWOOD, _14th September, 1879._

244. DEAR MR. MALLESON,--The gentle words in your last letter
referring to the difference between yourself and me in the degree of
hope with which you could regard what could not but appear to the
general mind Utopian in designs for the action of the Christian Church,
surely might best be answered by appeal to the consistent tone of the
prayer we have been examining.

Is not every one of its petitions for a perfect state? and is not this
last clause of it, of which we are to think to-day--if fully
understood--a petition not only for the restoration of Paradise, but of
Paradise in which there shall be no deadly fruit, or, at least, no
tempter to praise it? And may we not admit that it is probably only for
want of the earnest use of this last petition that not only the
preceding ones have become formal with us, but that the private and
simply restricted prayer for the little things we each severally desire,
has become by some Christians dreaded and unused, and by others used
faithlessly, and therefore with disappointment?

245. And is it not for want of this special directness and simplicity of
petition, and of the sense of its acceptance, that the whole nature of
prayer has been doubted in our hearts, and disgraced by our lips; that
we are afraid to ask God's blessing on the earth, when the scientific
people tell us He has made previous arrangements to curse it; and that,
instead of obeying, without fear or debate, the plain order, "Ask, and
ye shall receive, that your joy may be full," we sorrowfully sink back
into the apology for prayer, that "it is a wholesome exercise, even when
fruitless," and that we ought piously always to suppose that the text
really means no more than "Ask, and ye shall _not_ receive, that your
joy may be _empty_"?

Supposing we were first all of us quite sure that we _had_ prayed,
honestly, the prayer against temptation, and that we would thankfully be
refused anything we had set our hearts upon, if indeed God saw that it
would lead us into evil, might we not have confidence afterwards that He
in whose hand the king's heart is, as the rivers of water, would turn
our tiny little hearts also in the way that th