Conferences

Of the Lord's Prayer.

And so there follows after these different kinds of supplication a still more sublime and exalted condition which is brought about by the contemplation of God alone and by fervent love, by which the mind, transporting and flinging itself into love for Him, addresses God most familiarly as its own Father with a piety of its own. And that we ought earnestly to seek after this condition the formula of the Lord's prayer teaches us, saying “Our Father.” When then we confess with our own mouths that the God and Lord of the universe is our Father, we profess immediately that we have been called from our condition as slaves to the adoption of sons, adding next “Which art in heaven,” that, by shunning with the utmost horror all lingering in this present life, which we pass upon this earth as a pilgrimage, and what separates us by a great distance from our Father, we may the rather hasten with all eagerness to that country where we confess that our Father dwells, and may not allow anything of this kind, which would make us unworthy of this our profession and the dignity of an adoption of this kind, and so deprive us as a disgrace to our Father's inheritance, and make us incur the wrath of His justice and severity. To which state and condition of sonship when we have advanced, we shall immediately be inflamed with the piety which belongs to good sons, so that we shall bend all our energies to the advance not of our own profit, but of our Father's glory, saying to Him: “Hallowed be Your name,” testifying that our desire and our joy is His glory, becoming imitators of Him who said: “He who speaks of himself, seeks his own glory. But He who seeks the glory of Him who sent Him, the same is true and there is no unrighteousness in Him.” Finally the chosen vessel being filled with this feeling wished that he could be anathema from Christ if only the people belonging to Him might be increased and multiplied, and the salvation of the whole nation of Israel accrue to the glory of His Father; for with all assurance could he wish to die for Christ as he knew that no one perished for life. And again he says: “We rejoice when we are weak but you are strong.” And what wonder if the chosen vessel wished to be anathema from Christ for the sake of Christ's glory and the conversion of His own brethren and the privilege of the nation, when the prophet Micah wished that he might be a liar and a stranger to the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, if only the people of the Jews might escape those plagues and the going forth into captivity which he had announced in his prophecy, saying: “Would that I were not a man that has the Spirit, and that I rather spoke a lie;” — to pass over that wish of the Lawgiver, who did not refuse to die together with his brethren who were doomed to death, saying: “I beseech You, O Lord; this people has sinned a heinous sin; either forgive them this trespass, or if You do not, blot me out of Your book which You have written.” But where it is said “Hallowed be Your name,” it may also be very fairly taken in this way: “The hallowing of God is our perfection.” And so when we say to Him “Hallowed be Your name” we say in other words, make us, O Father, such that we maybe able both to understand and take in what the hallowing of You is, or at any rate that You may be seen to be hallowed in our spiritual converse. And this is effectually fulfilled in our case when “men see our good works, and glorify our Father Which is in heaven.”