him because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity, he will
rise and give him as many as he needeth." The term [Greek: anaideian],
translated "importunity," signifies freedom from the bashfulness which
cannot ask a second time. The shamefacedness which prevents a modest man
from importuning a fellow-creature for a gift, after the first request
has been refused, is out of place in the intercourse between an empty
but believing suppliant and the God of all grace. If this Jewish
countryman in his perplexity had been ashamed to ask a second time, he
would have failed to accomplish his object; but because he was not so
ashamed, or at least did not permit the shame to drive him from his
purpose, he obtained at length all his desire. Now, his conduct in this
respect is specially commended to us for imitation in our prayer: "And I
say unto you, Ask and it shall be given you." As that man asked a gift
from a brother, we should ask from God. This is the kind of prayer that
Christ teaches us to address to God; and the Son who is in the bosom of
the Father will rightly declare the Father's mind.

The lesson is in some of its aspects difficult. We have not
experience--we have not faculties sufficient to make us capable of
understanding it fully. Our Teacher might have maintained silence
regarding it; or he might have said, as we often in substance say to
little children, "What thou knowest not now, thou shalt know hereafter;"
and this not from our unwillingness to teach, but from their incapacity
to comprehend. But the Lord does not leave us wholly ignorant, because
we are incapable of understanding all. He makes one point abundantly
clear--that persevering importunity in prayer is pleasing to God and
profitable to men.

But the lesson is not easy: analogies drawn from sensible objects or
human experience cannot express it fully. The two parables which bear
upon it--the one now under consideration, and that of the unjust
judge--touch only the edges of the theme. The human motive is in the one
picture mean, and in the other wicked; yet these are the best analogies
that can be found on earth for expressing this feature of our Father's
love.

Knowing the defect of the analogy employed in the parable, the Lord has
supported and supplemented it by a fact in his own history. The case of
the Syro-phoenician woman (Matt. xv. 21-28), although a historic
event, serves also as an allegory. The two parables, one enacted and the
oth