This sense of separateness is emphasized when we turn to the prayers of Christ.  And in this connection it is worthy of note that though Christ has much to say concerning the duty and blessedness of prayer, and Himself spent much time in prayer, yet never, so far as we know, did He ask for the prayers of others.  “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you as wheat:  but I made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not.”  So did Jesus pray for His disciples; but we never read that they prayed for Him, or that He asked for Himself a place in their prayers.  How significant the silence is we learn when we turn to the Epistles of St. Paul and to the experience of the saints.  “Brethren, pray for us”—­this is the token in almost every Epistle.  In the long, lone fight of life even the apostle’s heart would have failed him had not the prayers of unknown friends upheld him as with unseen hands.  There is no stronger instinct of the Christian heart than the plea for remembrance at the throne of God.  “Pray for me, will you?” we cry, when man’s best aid seems as a rope too short to help, yet long enough to mock imprisoned miners in their living tomb.  But the cry which is so often ours was never Christ’s.

It has further been remarked that, intimate as was Christ’s intercourse with His disciples, He never joined in prayer with them.[17] He prayed in their presence, He prayed for them, but never with them.  “It came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, that when He ceased, one of His disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us to pray, even as John also taught his disciples.  And He said unto them, When ye pray, say——.”  Then follows what we call “The Lord’s Prayer.”  But, properly speaking, this was not the Lord’s prayer; it was the disciples’ prayer:  “When ye pray, say------.”  And when we read the prayer again, we see why it could not be His.  How could He who knew no sin pray, saying, “Forgive us our sins”?  The true “Lord’s Prayer” is to be found in the seventeenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel.  And throughout that prayer the holy Suppliant has nothing to confess, nothing to regret.  He knows that the end is nigh, but there are no shadows in His retrospect; of all that is done there is nothing He could wish undone or done otherwise.  “I glorified Thee on the earth, having accomplished the work which Thou hast given Me to do.”  It is so when He comes to die.  Among the Seven Words from the Cross we are struck by one significant omission:  the dying Sufferer utters a cry of physical weakness—­“I thirst”—­but He makes no acknowledgement of sin; He prays for the forgiveness of others—­“Father, forgive them:  for they know not what they do”—­He asks none for Himself.  The great Augustine died with the penitential Psalms hung round his bed.  Fifty or sixty times, it is said, did sweet St. Catharine of Siena cry upon her deathbed, Peccavi, Domine miserere mei, “Lord, I have sinned:  have mercy on me.”  But in all the prayers of Jesus, whether in life or in death, He has no pardon to ask, no sins to confess.