1. TAKE heed that you do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye 2 have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore, when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do, in the synagogues, and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily, I say unto you, They have 3 their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right 4 hand doeth; that thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret, himself shall reward thee openly. 5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are; for they love to pray standing in the synagogues, and in the corners of the streets, that they may be 6 seen of men. Verily, I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly. 7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that 8 they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them: for 9 your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him. After this man- ner therefore pray ye: 10 Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy 11, 12 will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive 13 us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen. 14 For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:

15. But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

16. 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,

17. They have their reward. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thy head, and wash thy

18 face; 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.

SOMETIMES, to go and be alone with God and Christ in the fellowship of the Spirit, just for the joy and blessedness of it; to open, with reverent yet eager hands, the door into the presence chamber of the great King, and then to fall down before him, it may be, in silent adoration; our very attitude an act of homage, our merely being there, through the motive that prompts it, being the testimony of our soul’s love; to have our set day-hours of close communion, with which no other friends shall interfere, and which no other occupations may interrupt; to which we learn to look forward with a living gladness; on which we look back with satisfaction and peace; this indeed is prayer, for its own sake, for God’s sake, for our friends’ sake, for the Church’s sake, for our work’s sake; prayer which we do not hurry through, to still the conscience, but which (other things permitting) we can even linger over to satisfy the heart. If we Christians, who talk so much about the privilege and blessedness of prayer, would try to avail ourselves of it as we may, how should we reflect on the world around us the glory, as it streams on us from the face of the incarnate Mediator! A. W. T.

1. Righteousness instead of alms. This is in accordance with all the critical editions of the Greek Testament, and also with the context; for the word “righteousness” is here general, including the subsequent specifications of alms (verse 2), prayer (verse 5), and fasting (verse 16). R.—3. “So far from doing good that others may see it, thou must not even think of it as thy own work; do it in childish simplicity, from thy loving spirit, as if thou couldst not do otherwise.” This principle Christ applies to three separate acts, in which the Pharisees were specially wont to make a pious display, viz.: Alms, prayer, and fasting. N.

2. Have their reward. They have it; have it out, the original language says; have it to the full, and have all they will have. There is nothing left over, to be treasured up for them out of sight in the keeping of a Father in heaven. V.

6. If we would find God, and be his children, and have the great reward of his presence, we must “enter into the closet, and shut the door, and pray to the Father who is in secret.” Whenever the uplifted soul approaches God in its sincerest devotion, it must go alone; if other souls bend around, in unity of spirit, yet the communion of each with the Father is solitary, and each must be accepted not for another, but by itself. It must bear its own single burden to the mercy-seat. “Hast thou faith, have it to thyself before God.” In order to let the great truths and influences of religion do their work upon us, we must put ourselves in the range and sweep of their action; we must—so to speak—give them a chance at our inner life. The street is no such place; the crowd is no such place. Enter into thy closet. Solitude is a means of spiritual education. Seek it; ordain it; cherish it; value it not for its own sake, but for faith’s sake and Christ’s sake; sanctify your life by the prayers it will then inspire. F. D. H.—Prayer is the most secret intercourse of the soul with God, and requires retirement, at least of the heart; for this is the closet in the house of God, which house is ourselves. Thither we ought to retire, even in public prayer, and in the midst of company. What goodness is there equal to this of God, to give not only what we ask, and more than we ask of him, but to reward even prayer itself! Q.

7. What is forbidden here is not much praying, for our Lord himself passed whole nights in prayer; nor praying in the same words, for this he did in the intensity of his agony in Gethsemane; but the making number and length a point of observance, and imagining that prayer will be heard, not because it is the genuine expression of the desire of faith, but because it is of such a length, or has been so many times repeated. A.—He who spake a parable “that men ought always to pray and not to faint,” must be as far as possible from finding fault with prayer which is long drawn out, if only it be prayer indeed. He can only condemn that in which, while it retains the name of prayer, an endless tumult of words is substituted for all deeper

(and oftentimes in words unspeakable) utterances of the spirit. T.

8. Your Father knoweth what ye need.**

Prayer is the preparation and the enlargement of the heart for the receiving of the divine gift; which, indeed, God is always prepared to give, but we are not always prepared to receive. In the act of prayer there is a purging of the spiritual eye, which thus is averted from the things earthly that darken it, and becomes receptive of the divine light—able not to endure only the brightness of that light, but to rejoice in it with an ineffable joy. In the earnest asking is the enlargement of the heart for the abundant receiving; even as in it is also the needful preparation for the receiving with a due thankfulness; while, on the contrary, the good which came unsought would too often remain the unacknowledged also. T.—Prayer is not designed to inform God, but to give man a sight of his misery, to humble his heart, to excite his desire, to inflame his faith, to animate his hope, to raise his soul toward heaven, and to put him in mind that there is his Father, his country, his inheritance. He is a Father to whom we pray; let us go to him with confidence: he knows our wants; let us remove far from us all anxious disquiet and concern. Q.

9-13. The seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer admit of a clear division into three and four; for in the first three the cause of God—his name, his kingdom, and his will—is the subject of supplication; whereas the four others refer to our own concerns—to daily bread, forgiveness of sins, defence from temptation, and deliverance from all evil. C. B.—He had created a new heaven and a new earth for the soul, and in this prayer the mighty revelation of the Fatherhood of God shines, like a sun, over all humanity. The highest conceivable ideal of perfection and felicity for the race is offered in the will of the eternal Father being done on earth as it is in heaven. Childlike trust and dependence ask and are contented with daily bounty from that Father’s hand. His mercy is pleaded by hearts that already have learned to show it to others. The spirit stands before him clothed in humility, and full of love and tenderness toward its fellows. Conscious weakness stretches out its hand for heavenly help, distrusting itself, but strong in a Higher. Each clause, almost each word, is full of the deepest significance. Each is filled with divine light. After eighteen centuries, Christendom knows no expression of thoughts and feelings so full in so small a compass, so rich, so majestic in praise and petition. G.

9. Our Father who art in heaven.** This invocation brings God into the closest personal relation to us, and yet it raises him infinitely above us. It reveals a love near to us, yet transcending while it embraces us. No closeness of relationship with

God brings him down to our level. He remains far above us. “Our Father” indeed, but “Our Father in heaven.” If we bow in adoration, we must bow before a personal Presence—a throne at once of mercy and judgment, of righteousness and of grace—a Will higher than our own, whither our wills, feeble and wavering, yet pointing beyond earth and flesh, may ascend. Such a Will it is, such a Presence, such a Heart, such an enthroned Personality that is revealed to us in Christ: a Father, yet a Judge; a Saviour, yet a Lord; near to us, yet infinitely transcending us; “having respect unto the lowly, yet inhabiting eternity and the praises thereof.” Toward such a Presence and Person should we worship when we pray “after this manner.” Tulloch.—The direct relation of man to God as a person to a person, which formed the basis of the Old Testament connection between the Divine Ruler and his chosen people, is extended to all nations of the earth in the opening words. God is a Father only to those who can be conscious of dependence upon him. Just as the parent is first known to the child as the person on whom he is immediately dependent, who is able to grant his requests and give him such things as are needful, so man learns to look on God as the Being on whom he is ultimately dependent for his existence and welfare; who as a Person is capable of showing favor to those dependent upon him, and as a Person can be regarded with feelings of love, reverence, gratitude, trust, and fear. This is the first characteristic of our consciousness of the Fatherhood of God: its natural expression is the language of prayer: the natural impulse to this expression is the conviction that God can hear and answer prayer. H. L. M.—He who says, “Our Father,” sums up in this word, forgiveness of sins, justification, sanctification, redemption, adoption, inheritance, brotherly fellowship with the only-begotten Son, and the gifts of the Holy Ghost in all their fulness. Chrys.

In heaven. While it is quite true that the local heavens are no more the habitation of God than any other place—that, since God is a spirit, all place is out of place when we are thinking of him—yet this attribution of the pure immeasurable spaces of the ether above us to God for his habitation, is part of the unconscious symbolism which is common to all places and to all people. The introduction of the words into the beginning of this prayer rests on this universal symbolism; they are, as it were, a sursum corda, they remind us that now we have lifted up our hearts from earth and things earthly to another and a higher world. T.

These opening words of the Lord’s Prayer set clearly before us the status of the Christian, as believing in, depending upon, praying to, a real objective personal God, lifted above him: to approach whom he must lift up his heart, as the eye is lifted up from earth to heaven. This strikes at the root of all pantheistic error, which regards the spirit of man as identical with the Spirit of God; and at the root of all deism—testifying as it does our relation to and covenant dependence on our heavenly Father. A.

9,10. Hallowed be thy name, etc.** The beginning of the work of God in us is the hallowing of his name: the form in which the divine work is perfected, as well as the means by which it comes to perfection, is the kingdom of God. This kingdom was prefigured in Israel: it was introduced in its essence by Christ; and through his power it advances in the course of the ages toward its perfection. Thus the second petition, “Thy kingdom come,” is connected with the first, which indicates the final goal of all things, the perfect harmony of the creature with the will of the Creator. These three petitions thus present the beginning, middle, and end of the development of the kingdom of God. A. T.—It is for the full consummation and triumph of the great plan of redemption—whether in the outward dispensation of the gospel, the inward dominion of grace in the heart, or the final development of grace into the glory of heaven—that we pray in the petition, Thy kingdom come. V. D.

11. Give us daily bread.** The things eternal having been thus asked for, the petitions which remain have to do with this life of our pilgrimage. This “bread” is rather the whole aliment of body and of spirit; of the body, as food, with whatever else is necessary for our earthly life and of the spirit no less; so that the frequent communions, the daily worship, the study of the Scriptures, the hymns we hear and sing, these all will appertain to, and be included in, the “daily bread” which we ask. A silent rebuke is here for the worshipper, who takes these words in his mouth, while he is allowing himself in anxious and far-looking cares, while he is making luxurious provision for the flesh and for its lusts. It is but “bread” which with his lips he asks, and that for the day. This prayer is the answer of the faithful to the admonition of the apostle, “Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content.” T.

This day. God nowhere promises to give either temporal or spiritual blessings in advance, but reserves to himself the fatherly prerogative to spread our table and proportion our grace, according to our day. He would thus cultivate in us a sense of absolute and continual dependence. Our bread. The bread which is appropriate to us by the divine blessing on our own exertions; not the bread of idleness, nor of violence, nor of deceit; but our bread, coming down to us like manna from heaven, yet gathered by our own diligence in a business in whose minutest details we are not ashamed to ask God to prosper us. . . . The sense of dependence on God, and of trust in his promises—cultivated in the first instance at the lowest point of our temporal necessities, where it is often most difficult—pervades and controls the whole course of a Christian’s experience. The faith that trusts for daily bread and the divine gratitude that “puts joy and gladness into the heart,” rise into higher spheres, and take hold upon broader and more precious promises. The same hand that gives daily bread gives also daily grace, according to the same wise economy; and the same habit that trusts for temporal, trusts also for spiritual blessings—for living grace while life lasts, for dying grace in a dying day, and for eternal life when grace is swallowed up in glory. V. D.

12. Give and forgive:** such needs to be our perpetual appeal to heaven, long as we remain upon earth. The one is the cry of want, and the other of guilt. Our debts. Our forgetfulness of sin does not obliterate or annul it. Guilt is here expressly called our debt; perchance to guard us against that very neglect and oblivion. Of old, debt perilled not only the property, but the liberty, and in Roman law the life of the man indebted. Even thus, our guilt, unconfessed, unrepented, and unforgiven, left slowly to grow, with growing years and worldliness and unbelief, is mortgaging our happiness, our spiritual freedom, and our eternal life. W. R. W.

This petition Augustine does not refer to the great forgiveness, which is assumed as a thing already possessed. He refers this rather to the sins of a daily infirmity, in which even he who watches the most will yet be entangled; and without which a life in the flesh can scarcely be led: scarcely without some of the world’s dust adhering to him will even the faithful man walk through the world’s paths. But in this prayer there is the shaking off this dust before it has settled upon him and hardened into a crust. Herein is the daily washing of the feet, for them that are already partakers of the great washing. The daily sins of a Christian man may be small, yet are not therefore to be despised, for if despised, then, though not else, they become indeed dangerous. T.

As we forgive. We cannot release our fellow-men from the guilt of their wrong-doing, even though we have been its chief object. But in some good though imperfect degree, we can be, like our Father in heaven, free from wrath, revenge, and hatred. V. D.—How terrible a prayer this may become! If we pray it, keeping an unforgiving temper, we shall be ourselves blocking up the way by which our prayers should have ascended, not merely failing to extricate ourselves from the bands of our sins, but with our own hands drawing the cords of them more closely round us than before. T.

13. Lead us not into temptation.** Confessed guiltiness is the language of the preceding petition. Conscious weakness is that of this request: weakness imploring help against itself and its many foes, lest guilt return and remain upon us. W. R. W.—Satan tempts to bring out men’s evil to their ruin, God to bring out, and through the conflict to strengthen, their good to their everlasting gain; or if to bring out their sin, yet this only as a process of transition to a higher good; that so, discovering and recovering from their sin, they may walk henceforward more humbly, more circumspectly; that knowing better the evil which is in them, they may take up arms the more earnestly against it. “Lead us not into temptation” is indeed what it seems at first sight, a prayer that we may not be tempted; yet not as declining to meet temptation when it comes, not as denying the blessing with which it may be charged; while yet out of a deep sense of our own infirmity, and of the uncertainty of the issue, we pray that it may be avoided. T.

Deliver us from evil. Including the assaults of the evil one among our other temptations, we offer the comprehensive petition to be delivered from all sin, whether the provocation to commit it comes from the world in which we live, from the spiritual wickedness with which we wrestle, or from our own hearts. V. D.—Herein we pray that God would neither try us himself beyond our strength, nor suffer the devil, the world, or our own flesh to do it; that, if it be his will, we may not be exposed to any great temptations at all; but if, for any ends of his wise providence, he shall think fit to suffer us to be tempted, that then he would strengthen and support us, carry us through them with innocence and integrity, and not suffer us to be led by them into sin. Abp. Wake.—It is a proof of prudence, as well as of our sincerity in making this petition, not to court danger or invite temptation. Every man knows the quarter from which his danger arises, and his own heart will tell him where he is vulnerable. The attacks of temptation are so numerous and various, that no one can lay down rules for securing ourselves against them. The wisest way is as much as possible to avoid them. But, above all things, hold no parley with temptation; for the man that once deliberates on the brink of vice, is too surely in danger of being lost in its bottomless abyss. Carr.

For thine is the kingdom, etc. The doxology has maintained its place in the prayers of the whole Christian Church, in our English version of the Bible, and in the standards of all Protestant denominations, in spite of all the historic arguments adduced against it; because it harmonizes with the foregoing petitions, because it epitomizes the testimony and example of other Scriptures (1 Chron.

29 : 10-13; 1 Tim. 1 : 17; Jude 25), and because it is suitable to Christian consciousness and experience. It fits like a crown upon the whole prayer; it sums up all the petitions, and turns them into praise; it completes the circle of our devout desires, bringing them back to the source from which they start, in the kingdom and power of our Father in heaven; it expresses the ground of hope on which all our petitions are based, and teaches us that the success of prayer depends on God alone; it sums up both the argument and the end of all prayer in the glory of God; and it seals what goes before with our desire and expectation to be heard, in the solemn Amen. V. D.

As the eternal things are first in dignity, they are here placed first in order. We are asking in the first three petitions things which, though having for us a beginning in time, will yet stand fast through eternity; the name will be hallowed, the kingdom will be established, and the will accomplished forever. But the other and later petitions relate to things transient: the daily bread will not be needed by them who are nourished on the beatific vision of God; nor the forgiveness of trespasses by them that now sin no more; nor exemption from temptation, when there is nothing any longer within or without to tempt; nor deliverance from evil, when all evil shall have ended. There is not any possible request that a faithful man ought to make which cannot be reduced under one or other rubric of this prayer; which is not an unfolding of something which is shut up in the Lord’s Prayer. It is only such a request as ought never to have been made, something that we “ask amiss,” which will not range itself under one or other of these petitions. T.

14,15. If ye forgive not, neither will your Father forgive.** Our Lord returns back upon this condition of our obtaining forgiveness, and upon this only, among all the matters of which the prayer had treated; here giving one blow more to the die, so as to make the impression sharper and deeper on the minds of all. And this he does because of the fearful consequence of a failure here; for to retain our anger or our malice is not merely to retain one sin, but, in the retaining of that one, to retain also every other; it is not merely to shut one door, but in that one to shut every door by which the grace of God might enter into our souls. T.

16. Fasting had become one of the prominent religious usages of our Saviour’s day. Though only one fast had been appointed by Moses—that of the Day of Atonement—the Pharisees had added numerous others, especially on the two days of the week—Monday and Thursday—on which synagogue worship was held. When fasting, they strewed their heads with ashes, and neither washed nor anointed themselves nor trimmed their beards, but put on wretched clothing, and showed themselves in all the outward signs of mourning and sadness used for the dead. G.—18. Appear not to men. In nothing does the gospel more commend itself to the conscience of mankind than in its abhorrence of hypocrisy and double dealing, its denunciation of all severance between seeming and being. V.

[Connection with the following section:] All these acts of devotion were to be offered with sole reference to the love of God, in a simplicity which sought no earthly reward, but which stored up for itself a heavenly and incorruptible treasure. And the service to be sincere must be entire and undistracted. The cares and the anxieties of life were not to divert its earnestness or to trouble its repose. F. (For another comment on the Lord’s Prayer, read Section 90.)

Section 39.—Sermon on the Mount. Treasure. Service. Trust.

19. LAY not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, 20 and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break 21, 22 through nor steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be 23 full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! 24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. 25 Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than 26 meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. 27 Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit 28 unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the 29 field how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you, That 30 even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? 31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, 32 Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek;) for 33 your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. 34 Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

To Christians, Providence is no mere abstract attribute, but a living person. Jesus himself—God and man—is the Providence of the Christian Church. He is the Providence of the Christian still. “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world!” “I will not leave you comfortless.” He is indeed our good Shepherd, so that if we will, we lack nothing. It is he who encourages us with his voice, who guides us with his eye, who feeds us in the green pastures with the bread of heaven, who washes us from the stains that we gather as we pass along the road of life, in his precious and cleansing blood. In each joy, in each sorrow, in each friend whom we meet, in each opposition that befalls us, he is or he has been near; and beyond them all—beyond the horizon which our eyesight here cannot pass—he too still awaits us to crown these years of care and love through which he has tended us by receiving us at length with the arms of his mercy into our eternal home. Ah, if the lilies of the field are so beautiful, what will be the beauty of the white garments of the saints! Let us one and all think often and deeply of that future, and let us take our parts. H. P. L.

IN the Sermon on the Mount our Lord gave an outline of that new kingdom of heaven which he proposed to set up upon the earth, and of which he was himself to be the sovereign. He first describes the character of its citizens, in the beatitudes. He then points out the nature of their influence among mankind at large. They were to preserve society from corruption like the salt; they were to guide it like a city set on a hill, like the light upon a candlestick. He then proceeds to explain that the law of the new kingdom would not destroy the law of the old, but on the contrary would fulfil it—fulfil it in the spirit even where setting it aside in the letter; and then he shows how this principle would apply to six different precepts of the ancient law, which he passes successively in review. After this he describes the new life of the citizens of the kingdom as seen in the unostentatious practice of almsgiving, of prayer, of fasting, but also as apprehended even more intimately in its ruling temper and spirit, in its persistent laying up of the true treasure in heaven, in its single-minded devotion to the service of God, in its comparative indifference to earthly interests, such as those of food and dress. H. P. L.

19-34. From cautions against the hypocrisy of formalists, the discourse naturally passes to the entire dedication of the heart to God, from which all duties of the Christian should be performed. This is enjoined with regard to earthly treasures, from the impossibility of serving God and mammon; and with regard to earthly cares, from the assurance that our Father careth for us. A.

19. Moth and rust . . . thieves. The first represents our most valued things as subject to decay from a principle within; the second, as liable to be forced from us by a violence from without: on both accounts unable to make us happy, and consequently unworthy to take possession of our hearts. R. S.

20. Lay up in heaven. A man may, if he will, hoard his treasure. He may invest his money with large advantage: he may treat it as all his own, and think only how to insure its possession to himself and to his children. He can do so. If he does, he is laying up his treasure upon earth. On the other hand, a man may, if he will, dispense his treasures. If he gives from principle, out of love to others because God in Christ has first loved him, our Lord here says that that man is not losing, not squandering, but laying up: his treasure is growing all the time: and with this difference from the other, that he is laying up where there is no rust, no moth, no thief; laying up in heaven, where the Almighty and the All-true is at once pledged to keep and pledged to repay. V.—He who gave, desires that we should not lose even his lower gifts, but should keep them forever; and therefore gives counsels such as this, offering to take into his own secure keeping that which we in no other way can retain; to send it before us, to that world whither we are certainly going, that we may find it there. Beware lest you be of the number of them, the men of the earth, who have slept the sleep of a vain worldly existence, and when they awaken to a world of realities their hands are empty; they have found nothing, and this because they placed nothing in the hand of Christ, which in each one of his poor was stretched out to them. That which comes from his people at the gentle pressure of his simple bidding, comes as the fine and sweet and golden-colored olive-oil which runs freely from the fruit, almost before ever the press has touched them. T.

21. Where your treasure, there your heart. Whatever man loves, that is his god. For he carries it in his heart; he goes about with it night and day; he sleeps and wakes with it, be it what it may—wealth or pelf, pleasure or renown. Luther.—Christ desires his people to lay up store in heaven, that they may have a heart in heaven; this is why he bids them to lift up their goods, that they may lift up their souls as well. For it is the power which the “treasure” has inevitably to draw after it the heart, the fact that it is the loadstar to which the needle must point, which makes it of such consequence where this treasure is stored. T.—No one ever went to heaven, whose heart was not there before. R. S.

22. Thine eye single. The single eye is the pure intention. The eye is neither single nor pure when it looks upon two differing objects at once; nor the heart when it pretends to unite God and the world, to be the servant of Christ and to please men, and to reconcile the gospel with the stronger desire of earthly things. Nothing is more single than the eye of faith; there is nothing which renders our whole conduct more uniform in goodness, than to follow singly the light of it. Q.—23. The light in thee. Not here the lamp as the natural eye was called in previous verse (“light of the body”). Reference is had to the mind, the intellectual light of a man. If that be darkened by false views of life, how great and fatal that darkness! To err in the comparative value of earthly and heavenly riches is proof that the soul is shrouded in this fatal darkness. J. J. O.

24. God and mammon. Either heaven or earth—either God or the world—one, not both, will be the place of your treasure; one, not both, will be the Lord of your service. V.—No man can have two chief goods. It is indeed more impossible than to serve two masters; forasmuch as the heart is more laid out upon what a man loves, than upon what he serves. Besides that the soul is but of a stinted operation; and cannot exert its full force and vigor upon two diverse, much less contrary objects. A man must first have two hearts and two souls and two selves, before he can give a heart to God and a heart to the world too. R. S.—There is one point—and it is the point of motive—where the world’s people and God’s people divide. There is a mark where living for self-gratification, whether sensual or intellectual, ends, and living for Christ and his righteousness takes its place; where self-will ceases to be the controlling force, and religious principle begins to be. There will not be spotless holiness on one side, nor unmitigated depravity on the other. But there is a divergence as wide apart in its issues as heaven and hell. On one side, notions, feelings, acts, which might otherwise seem to be neutral, take a taint of evil from an ungodly bias of the life. On the other side, actions and feelings which might otherwise be indifferent are stamped as good, because the ruling affection, the radical intention of life is right, or Christian. So neutrality ends, and every least thing has one of two contradictory, characteristic qualities. And so regeneration is both a philosophical and a Christian fact. “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” F. D. H.

25. Take no thought does not express the sense, but gives rather an exaggeration of the command, and this makes it unreal and nugatory. It is, Be not anxious, at sea tossed about between hope and fear. A.—Our Lord does not forbid provident forethought. But he forbids anxious, restless, distrustful solicitude about earthly things. W.

26. God gave to the birds their free, uncaring nature, and the instinct by which they seek their food; and in the diversities of food made ready for the diversities of creatures are manifested a forethought and plan that argue an intelligent Providence. The uniformity of this adaptation cannot account for the fact of the adaptation; and when we inquire why each bird and each beast seeks always and finds its own kind of food, there can be no better answer than that which Christ has given, “Your heavenly Father feedeth them.” J. P. T.

27. Stature. Should be translated age or term of life, because the caution is against anxious care about the preservation of life, and about food, the means of prolonging it. Besides, the measure of a cubit agrees much better to a man’s age than to his stature, the smallest addition to which would have been better expressed by a hair’s-breadth, or the like, than by a cubit, which is more than the fourth part of the whole height of most men. In the Old Testament we find the life of man compared to measures of length, a hand-breadth, and a span. M.—And there is this more decisive objection, that increase of stature is not a matter about which men take anxious thought; it can scarcely be said for one in ten thousand to be an object of desire. It is otherwise with added length of days. T.

28. The grander features of the scenery, the mountains, the forests, the striking points of Oriental vegetation, palm and cedar and terebinth, the images, in short, which fill the pages of the psalmists and prophets of the older dispensation, have no place in the gospel discourses. As a general rule, every image, every emotion, is drawn from the humbler and plainer figures of every-day life and observation—vineyards and cornfields, shepherds and ploughmen, travellers and fishermen. And if the beauty of nature attract his notice, it is still of the same simple and general kind—the burst of the radiance of an eastern sun—the lively instincts and movements of the careless birds over his head—the gay colors of the carpet of flowers under his feet. The homeliness of the illustrations, while it links the teaching with the daily life of his time, yet sufficiently frees them from local peculiarity to render them of universal application. They gain more force and vividness by being still seen on the spot, but they need little or no explanation beyond what they themselves convey. A. P. S.

29. The Huleh lily is very large, and the three inner petals meet above and form a gorgeous canopy, such as art never approached and king never sat under, even in his utmost glory. And when I met this incomparable flower, in all its loveliness, among the oak woods around the northern base of Tabor and on the hills of Nazareth, where our Lord spent his youth, I felt assured that it was this to which he referred. W. M. T.—As the beauty of the flower is unfolded from within, from the capacities of its own life, so must a true adornment of man be unfolded from within by the same Almighty Spirit. As nothing from without can defile a man, so nothing from without can adorn him. A.

31. Take no thought. Christ has been urging to unity; unity within. Let the whole man be one. Let him have one aim, not two; one sight, not two; one treasure, by will and choice, even as he will have but one in God’s judgment. And then follows, Take no thought: and the word itself is derived from one which signifies division, distraction. Be not anxious is, in the Greek, Be not divided. Anxiety is a mind going two ways: a mind hovering and wavering between two alternatives, of hope and fear. 32. Knoweth that ye need. Life does need, he says, certain supports and certain appliances; few indeed and simple, yet constant and adequate: life needs these things, and God, your heavenly Father, knows it. Anxiety is not only useless because it cannot get and cannot do what it would: it is needless also for this reason, that your Father knows your wants—knows, recognizes, and will supply. V.—Christianity forbids no necessary occupations, no reasonable indulgences, no innocent relaxations. It allows us to use the world, provided we abuse it not. All that it requires is, that our liberty degenerate not into licentiousness, our amusements into dissipation, our industry into incessant toil, our carefulness into extreme anxiety and endless solicitude. P.

33. Seek ye first the kingdom of God.** Be God’s wholly and singly; and let neither covetousness on the one hand, nor mistrustful anxiety on the other, distract your attention or divide your service. The kingdom of God: God is already reigning. Already there is a true spiritual power exercised by God himself, in Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit, over and in the hearts of men. And his righteousness: Seek to be what God is, in his love of holiness, in his abhorrence of evil; seek to be like God in his purity, in his patience, in his disinterestedness, in his love. 34. Leave for to-morrow to-morrow’s anxieties: then it will be to-day: then will Christ’s precept enter into it, with Christ’s promise, and the anxiety postponed will be an anxiety prevented. V.—Sufficient for the day. The trouble of each day is sufficient for the day; and he who has been with us to-day will be with us to-morrow. In this ever-memorable precept, Christ consults our natural quiet, no less than our spiritual welfare. The chief sources of uneasiness are, vexation at what is past, or forebodings of what is to come: whereas what is past ought to give us no disquiet, except that of repentance for our faults; and what is to come ought much less to affect us, because with regard to us and our concerns, it is not, and perhaps never will be. The present is what we are apt to neglect. That, well employed, will render the remembrance of the past pleasant, and the prospect of the future comfortable. P.—He exhorts us to take God for our master and not mammon; and this on the great principle that God is sure to take good care of his servants. He feeds and clothes them to-day; and while they are doing his work, he is taking care for their to-morrow. Hamilton.

He really lives according to the spirit of these precepts, who is confident that if by infirmity or other cause he is cut off from his work, he shall indeed be fed without his toil, as the birds are, that he shall be clothed as the lilies are; but with health and strength and opportunity, knows that these are God’s appointed means whereby he shall acquire things needful for the body; yet esteems not because he labors, that it is any other than God who does truly feed him and clothe him now: who knows that it is the solicitude, and not the labor (for that is God’s appointment), which is excluded; the doubt whether God could, if need were, provide for us in any other way, that is forbidden. T.

THE gospels show that the lilies and the grass of the field; the hen, as it gathers its young in its mother-love; the birds of the air, as they eat and drink, without care, from the bounty around them; the lambs that follow the shepherd, but sometimes go astray and are lost in the wilderness; the dogs so familiar in Eastern cities; the foxes that make their holes in the thickets; the silent plants and flowers, the humble life of the creatures of the woods, the air, the fold, and the street, were all alike noticed in these early years of preparation. Nor was man neglected. The sports of childhood; the rejoicings of riper life; the bride and the bridegroom; the mourner and the dead; the castles and palaces of princes, and the silken robes of the great; the rich owners of field and vineyard; the steward, the travelling merchant, the beggar, the debtor; the toil of the sower and of the laborer in the vineyard, or of the fisher on the lake; the sweat of the worker; the sighs of those in chains, or in the dungeon, were seen, and heard, and remembered. G.

Section 40.—Sermon on the Mount. Judge not. Ask. Enter in.