Then the prayer is a pledge of thankful recognition of God in our blessings.

Ah! dear friends, are we not all guilty in this?  How utterly heathenish is our oblivion of God in our daily life!  How far we have come from that temper which recognises Him in all joys, and begins every new day with Him!  Daily mercies demand daily songs of praise.  His love wakens us morning by morning.  It follows us all the day long with its fatherly benefits.  It reveals itself anew every time He spreads our table, every time He gives us teaching or joy.  And our thanksgiving and consciousness of His presence should be as constant as are His gifts.  ’My voice shalt thou hear in the morning.’  ’They walk all the day long in the light of Thy countenance.’  ‘I will both lay me down in peace and sleep.’  ’They ate their meat with gladness and singleness of heart.’

II.  The union with our brethren in our prayer.

‘Give us.’  The struggle for existence is represented by many as the very law of human life.  The fight for bread is the great antagonist of brotherly regard for our fellows.  Trade is said to be warfare; and then others starting from that conception that one man’s gains are some other man’s losses, proclaim with undoubted truth on these premises ’property is robbery.’  But surely this clause of our prayer teaches us a more excellent way.  We are not to be like stiff-necked men who fight with one another for the drop of brackish water caught in the corner of a sail, but we are to be as children bowing down together before a great Father, all sitting at His table where nothing wants, and where even the pet dogs below it eat of the crumbs.

The main thing is to note how our Lord teaches us here to identify ourselves with others, to make common cause with them in our petition for bread.  He who rightly enters into the meaning of this prayer, and feels the unity which it supposes, can scarcely regard his possessions as given to himself alone, or to be held without regard to other people.  We are all one in need; high and low, rich and poor, we all hang on God for the same supplies.  We are all one in reception of His gifts.  Is it becoming in one who is a member of such a whole, to clasp his portion in both his hands and carry it off to a corner where he gnaws it by himself?  That is how wolves feast, with one foot on their bone and a watchful eye all round for thieves, not how men, brethren, should feast.

I am not here to deal with economical questions, or to apply principles to details, but surely one may say that this petition contemplates as possible a better state of things than ‘each for himself,’ whether God is for us all or no, and that it does teach that at all events a man is part of a whole which has a claim on his possessions.  ’Neither said any man that aught which he possessed was his own.’