We identify ourselves in such a prayer with all who have sinned, and knowing that we are men of like passions, and that we may fall like them, we cry ‘lead us not.’

He who offers this prayer from such motives will best and most willingly meet temptation when it comes.  The soldier who goes into the field with careful circumspection, knowing the enemy’s strength and his own weakness, is the most likely to conquer.  It is the presumptuous men, confident in their own strength, who are sure to get beaten.

‘DELIVER US FROM EVIL’

     ’But deliver us from evil.’—­MATT. vi. 13.

The two halves of this prayer are like a calm sky with stars shining silently in its steadfast blue, and a troubled earth beneath, where storms sweep, and changes come, and tears are ever being shed.  The one is so tranquil, the other so full of woe and want.  What a dark picture of human conditions lies beneath the petitions of this second half!  Hunger and sin and temptation, and wider still, that tragic word which includes them all—­evil.  Forgiveness and defence and deliverance—­what sorrows these presuppose!  Each step of these latter supplications seems to carry us deeper into the shadow and the darkness, each to present a darker aspect of what human life really is; and now that we have reached the last, we have an all-comprehensive cry which holds within its meaning every ill that flesh is heir to.

But seeing that we have to do with a prayer, we have also to do with a prophecy.  We know that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us, and therefore the sadder the want which is expressed, the fuller of hope is the prayer.  This petition gives a dark picture of human wants, but whatsoever thing we pray about or against, we thereby profess to believe to be contrary to God’s will, and to be certain of removal by Him; and when our Lord commanded us to say ’Our Father, ... deliver us from evil,’ He gave us the lively hope that all which is included in that terribly wide word should be swept away, and that He would break every yoke and let His oppressed go free.  The whole sum of human sorrow is gathered into one petition, that we may all feel that every item of it is capable of attenuation and extinction; and so our prayer, in the very clause which seems to sound the lowest depth, really rises to the loftiest height, and the words which sound likest a wail over all the misery that is done under the sun, have in them the notes of triumph.  ’The sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought.’  The most jubilant and confident prayer is that which feels most keenly the burden of evil, and ’falling with its weight of sins ‘upon the great world’s altar-stairs,’ cries to God for deliverance.

Consider, then:—­

I. The width of this petition.

What is evil?