It does not follow that, because Christ did not speak it, we ought not to use it.  It should not be in the Bible, but it may well be in our prayers.  If we think that our Lord gave us a pattern rather than a form, we are quite justified in extending that pattern by any additions which harmonise with its spirit.  If we think He gave us a form to be repeated verbatim, then we ought not to add to it this doxology.

At first sight it seems as if the prayer without it were incomplete.  It contains loving desires, lowly dependence, humble penitence, earnest wishes for cleansing, but there appears none of that rapturous praise which is also an element in all true devotion.  And this may have been one reason for the addition of the doxology.  But I think that that absence of praise and joy is only apparent; the first clause of the prayer expresses the highest form of both.  The doxology, if you will think of it, adds nothing to the contemplation of the divine character which the prayer has already taught us.  It is only a repetition at the close of what we had at the beginning, and its conception, lofty and grand as it is, falls beneath that of ‘Our Father.’  We might almost say that the doxology is incongruous with the prayer as presenting a less blessed, spiritual, distinctively Christian thought of God.  That would be going too far, but I cannot but feel a certain change in tone, a dropping from the loftiest elevation down to the celebration of the lower aspects of the divine.  ‘Kingdom, power, and glory’ are grand, but they do not reach the height of ascription of praise which sounds in the very first words of the prayer.

Properly speaking, too, this doxology is not a part of the prayer.  It expresses two things:  the devout contemplation of God which the whole course of the petitions has excited in the soul—­and in that aspect it is the Church’s echo to the Lord’s Prayer; and the confidence with which we pray—­and in that aspect it is rather the utterance of meditative reflection asking of itself its reasons for hope and stirring itself up to lay hold on God.

Notice, then—­

I. The meaning of the doxology.

Kingdom, power, and glory correspond to kingdom, will, and hallowing in the first part.  The order is not the same, but it is still substantially identical.

‘Thine the kingdom.’  All earthly things, the whole fates of men here, are ruled by Him.  The prayer asked that it might be so; here we declare that it is so already, not, of course, in the deepest sense, but that even now and here He rules with authority.  ’Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,’ and this conviction is inseparable from our Christianity.  How hard it is to believe it at all times, from what we see around us!  The temptation is to think that the kingdom is men’s, or belongs to blind fate, or chance, and our own evil hearts ever suggest that the kingdom is our own.  Satan said, ’All is mine, and I will give it Thee.’