Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Chapter XVIII. Of the Lord's Prayer.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter XVIII.
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
forthwith 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 forthwith 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 Thy
name,” testifying that our desire and our joy is His glory,
becoming imitators of Him who said: “He who speaketh of himself,
seeketh 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.”1605
Finally the chosen
vessel being filled with this feeling wished that he could be anathema
from Christ1606
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 ye are
strong.”1607
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 hath the Spirit, and that I rather spoke a
lie;”1608
—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 Thee, O
Lord; this people hath sinned a heinous sin; either forgive them this
trespass, or if Thou do not, blot me out of Thy book which Thou hast
written.”1609
But where it is
said “Hallowed be Thy 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 Thy
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 Thee
is, or at any rate that Thou mayest 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.”1610
E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
