This does not reduce us all to one level, but leaves Him to settle what we do want.  How different this prayer in the mouth of a king and of a pauper!  But it does rebuke immoderate and unbridled desires.  God does not limit us to mere naked necessaries—­He giveth liberally, and means life to be beautiful and adorned.  That which is over and above bread is to a large extent that which makes life graceful and refined, and I have no wish to preach a crusade against it; but I have just as little hesitation in declaring what it is not left to pulpit moralists to say, that the falsely luxurious style of living among us looks very strange by the side of this petition.  So much luxury which does not mean refinement; so much ostentatious expenditure which does not represent increased culture or pleasure or anything but a resolve to be on a level with somebody else; so much which is so ludicrously unlike the poor little shrimp of a man or woman that sits in the centre of it all!

‘Plain living and high thinking are no more.’

’My riches consist not in the abundance of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants.’

‘The less a man needs, the nearer is he to the gods.’

So, what a lesson for us all in this age, where everyone of us is tempted to adopt a scale of what is necessary very far beyond the truth.

Young and old—­dare, if need be, to be poor.  ’Having food and raiment, let us therewith be content.’

We cannot all become rich, but let us learn to bring down our desires to, and bound them by, our true wants.

Christ has taught us here to put this petition after these loftier ones, and He has taught us to pass quickly by it to the more noble and higher needs of the soul.  Do we treat it thus, making it a secondary element in our wishes?  If so, then our days will be blessed, each filled with fresh gifts from God, and each leading us to Him who is the true Bread that came down from Heaven.

‘FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS’

     ’Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.’—­MATT. vi. 12.

The sequence of the petitions in the second half of the Lord’s Prayer suggests that every man who needs to pray for daily bread needs also to pray for daily forgiveness.  The supplication for the supply of our bodily needs precedes the others, because it deals with a need which is fundamental indeed, but of less importance than those which prompt the subsequent petitions.  God made us to need bread, we have made ourselves to need pardon.  The answer to the later petition is as certain as that to the earlier.  He who gives meat will not withhold forgiveness. Give and forgive refer to our deepest wants, but how many who feel the one are all unconscious of the other!

I. The consciousness of sin, of which this petition is the expression.