most intense prayer which man ever offered, prayer which was such an earnest wrestling with God as had never yet gone up from beneath the moon, our blessed Lord's prayer in the garden, has the name of " supplication" given to it in our authorised translation of the Epistle to the Hebrews, as also in the Latin Vulgate, "When he had offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears, unto him that was able to save him from death.” If the prayers of the sinless One were so intensely earnest, what have ours, think you, need to be? 5. "And grant." These words are an insertion of the translators, and probably a necessary one. In translating very terse Latin into English, some amount of enlargement and expansion is necessary to make it generally understood. But here the effect of the insertion is to unhook the latter part of the prayer from the foregoing, and to break up into two separate petitions what before was only one. But when there was only one petition, how did the parts of it hang together? I suppose in this way. Where God does not see fit to fulfil the prayers of His people, His favourable reception of them will show itself in enlightening them as to their duty and strengthening them to perform it. Where He cannot give the thing asked for, He will answer by light and strength. When we made known our requests to Him by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, we wanted our will done. His answer in effect is, "Nay, my child, not thy will, but mine, is thy highest good; and here is light to see my will, and strength to do it." 6. "May both perceive and know." The words "and know" are added by the translators. The Latin has only "may see." The addition of the verb 1 Heb. v. 7. to know is not superfluous. It conveys a slightly different notion from "perceive." Every one who perceives knows; but the converse will not hold; every one who knows does not perceive. To perceive is to know by instinct; to know intuitively; to know might imply a long course of study, or train of reasoning, resulting in knowledge. We perceive how we ought to act by the whispers of God's Spirit in the conscience; we arrive at the knowledge of how we ought to act by the study of God's Word. The Word of God, of course, as well as the Spirit of God, plays a most important part in our moral guidance; but I apprehend that in the prayer before us spiritual intuition is the thing principally meant; that intuition for which the Apostle prays on behalf of his Colossian converts; "that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; that ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing;" that intuition, which the heavenly Father pledges Himself to give, when He says to the penitent sinner, "I will guide thee with mine eye. Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding; whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle.' As much as to say, "Do not make harsh modes of dealing and galling restraints necessary; do not enforce me to use violence in governing you. As a mother guides her children with her eye upon them, needing not always to speak, much less to chide, her eye betokening alarm when they are in danger, displeasure when they have begun to do wrong, approbation when they are striving to please her; so will I, your heavenly Father, indicate to you the course which I wish you to pursue by the secret instigations of my Spirit, if you will constantly keep yourselves in my 1 Col. i. 9, 10. 2 Ps. xxxii. 8, 9. "2 presence, and listen with docility for my whispers." Let us then, in every perplexity about God's will, pray with Job, "That which I see not teach thou me."1 7. "And also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same." The "grace" and the "faithfully are expansions made by the translator, thought necessary perhaps in order to lead the mind to pause a little on the idea, but adding very little to the sense. "May have strength" (or become strong) "to fulfil what they see." This is the exact force of the original. Strength (that is, And the idea of moral strength) can only be by grace. "faithfully" is more or less implied in the verb "fulfil." To fulfil God's will is to execute it faithfully. How essential this clause is to the completeness of the prayer, we can understand only by considering the positively baneful effects of knowledge without practice. "To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin," 2 "And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes." "3 "He that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built an house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great.' "4 "If ye know these things, happy are ye if" (and only if) "ye do them." 5 2 St. James iv. 17. 3 St. Luke xii. 47. 5 St. John xiii. 17. 1 Job xxxiv. 32. CHAPTER XII. SECOND SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY. Almighty and everlasting God, who dost govern all things in heaven and earth; Mercifully hear the supplications of thy people, and grant us thy peace all the days of our life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Dmnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui coelestia simul et terrena moderaris; supplicationes populi tui clementer exaudi, et pacem tuam nostris concede temporibus. Per Dominum.-Greg. Sac.—Miss. Sar. IN translating this Collect, our Reformers have given a turn to the close of it, which must be admitted, I think, to be an improvement. The literal translation of the original, which is found in Gregory's Sacramentary, is as follows:-" Almighty and everlasting God, who dost control at once heavenly and earthly things, graciously regard the supplications of thy people, and grant thy peace to our times." Almighty and everlasting God." Almighty;" here is God's power; everlasting; " here is His perpetual existence in the future, long after our own generation has been swept away from the face of the earth, and when the affairs of men have taken a different turn, and the interests of men flow in a new channel. Nothing could be more exact as a translation than the word "everlasting." The original is an adjective derived from the adverb "always;" "always existing," in contrast with the transient and changeful existence of the creatures. And there is something in the close of the prayer as it stands in the original, which carries us back to this opening of it. God endures through all times, through all vicissitudes of human affairs. And in virtue of His Almightiness He controls those vicissitudes. We implore him, then, to "grant peace to our times "— those in which we ourselves have to play our part. "Who dost govern all things." The Latin word is not that, which we have before met with in the Collects, and which, in its original acceptation, signifies the prudent guidance of a helmsman. The original meaning of this word is to set bounds to, and hence to restrain. Thus it is used of the government of the tongue, which, of course, consists in restraining it from idle words, and of the government of horses, which implies the holding them in with the bridle and turning them.1 The word afterwards comes to have the more general meaning of administration and sway; but never altogether drops, I think, the notion of something which offers resistance to the administration, and rebels against the sway. Now, it is perfectly easy to see how, in the management of "earthly things," God finds such resistance to His sway. He has gifted man with freewill; and in the exercise of this freewill man has rebelled against Him, and has thereby introduced into human life and human affairs an element of disturbance, which complicates God's administration, and, to speak after the manner of men, makes it more difficult. Accordingly, as the Epistle to the Hebrews says, "we see not yet all things put under him," that is, under Jesus, who, we may usefully remind ourselves, is now governing the universe, in His mediatorial "2 1 The phrase moderari lingue is found in Plautus (Curc. 4, 1, 25) ; and equos moderari ac flectere in Cæsar (Bell. Gall. 4, 33). ? Heb. ii. 8. |