Then shall this mighty prayer be answered, the prayer of God’s children in all ages, the prayer which He offers before the Throne who on earth prayed, ’Not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil’; the prayer which the white-robed souls offer when they cry, ‘How long, O Lord, how long?’ the prayer which, all unconsciously, the sobs, and cries, and sorrows of six thousand years have been offering; the prayer which is every hour being answered in hourly mercies, and multitudes of forgivenesses and gracious guiding; the prayer which has been steadily tending towards its fulfilment, through all the ages during which God’s name has been growing in men’s love, and His will more and more obeyed, and His kingdom more and more fully come; the prayer which will be at last completely realised when all His children shall stand before His Throne happy and good, and the noise of earth’s evil shall sound only in the ear of memory, like the murmur of some far-off sea heard from the sacred mountain, or the remembrance of the tempest when all the winds are still.

If our prayer is, ‘Deliver us from evil,’ our life’s experience will be that ‘He delivered us from so great a death and will deliver,’ our dying word will be thanksgiving to ‘the angel who delivered us from all evil,’ and our death will bring the full deliverance for which while here we pray, and admit us into that region of unmingled good and blessing and purity, whose distant brightness we, tossing on the unquiet sea, behold from afar and long to possess.  ‘After this manner pray ye,’ and to you the promise will be blessedly fulfilled, ’Because he hath set his love upon Me, therefore will I deliver him.  I will set him on high, because he hath known My name’ (Ps. xci. 14).

‘THINE IS THE KINGDOM’

     ’Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. 
     Amen.’  MATT. vi. 13.

There is no reason to suppose that this doxology was spoken by Christ.  It does not occur in any of the oldest and most authoritative manuscripts of Matthew’s Gospel.  It does not seem to have been known to the earliest Christian writers.  Long association has for us intertwined the words inextricably with our Lord’s Prayer, and it is a wound to reverential feeling to strike out what so many generations have used in their common supplications.  No doubt this doxology is appropriate as a conclusion, and serves to give an aspect of completeness.  It sounds cold and cheerless to end our prayer with ‘evil.’  But the question is not one of feeling or of our notions of fitness, but purely one of criticism, and the only evidence which has any right to be heard in settling the text of the New Testament is dead against this clause.  If we regard that evidence, we are obliged to say that the doxology has no business here.  How it stands here is a question which may be answered satisfactorily.  When the Lord’s Prayer came to be used in public worship, it was natural to append to it a doxology, just as in chanting the psalms it became the habit to repeat at the end of each the Gloria.  This doxology, originally written on the margin of the gospel, would gradually creep into the text, and once there, was naturally retained.