Editorial August 5, 1916 Issue

"Our Father"

Archibald McLellan

A WRITER in The Christian Commonwealth recently said: "The Lord's Prayer is a social prayer. There is nothing in it that a man can ask for himself alone; every petition is for others as well as himself." The truth of this statement is so patent to all who really study the model prayer our Master gave his followers, saying, "After this manner therefore pray ye," it seems almost unnecessary that attention should be called to it.

It is a fact, however, that to many who from time to time or even daily repeat this prayer, it means nothing more than a personal appeal to Deity in behalf of the supplicant alone, just as extemporaneous prayer in so many instances conveys no other thought than that of personal benefit, asked for or demanded by the one who speaks. To such a petitioner "our daily bread," "our debts," and "our debtors" is just a modest avoidance of the first person singular, like the "we" behind which the editorial writer shelters his individual opinion—it is always the personal equation, the personal problem, that is foremost in his thoughts. This false concept of prayer arises from a false concept of God, a concept which regards Him as personal in an anthropomorphic sense, instead of being, as He is, "infinite Person," in the sense in which Mrs. Eddy describes Him on page 116 of Science and Health. God is truly "our Father," tender, loving, wise, and just, but not a kindly, benevolent personage who attends to the petitions addressed to Him just as an earthly parent listens to the child's plea for some favor and grants or refuses it as his supposedly superior wisdom dictates.

It may seem almost a platitude to say that the first requisite of prayer is that men shall understand God aright,—who and what He is; yet this knowledge of God, that knowledge or understanding which Jesus declared is "life eternal" to him that attains it, is something so largely ignored that it needs to be emphasized whenever prayer is thought of. Human sense swings clear of the Scylla of a "personal God" only to ward off from the Charybdis of a vague power which it recognizes as superior but cannot define; a "something" to which it can voice only a blind appeal. To pray to an "unknown God" is to pray to some deity whom men "ignorantly worship;" and this is just as useless today as Paul saw it to be when he said to the people who had gathered on Mars' hill to hear his doctrine, "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious."

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