ered for daily bread. In the
Lord's Prayer, the order of these petitions is exactly reversed. A
fresh basis, or premiss, for them, is supplied. They are still
petitions proper to put forward, if put forward in the consciousness
of a fact, hitherto not revealed--that man may do not his own will
but the will of Our Father, who is in heaven.

Prayer is thus, at the end, what it was at the beginning, the prayer
of a community. But whereas at the beginning the community was the
narrow and exclusive community of the family or tribe, at the end it
is a community which may include all mankind. Thus, the idea of God
has increased in its extension. In its intension, so to speak, it has
deepened: God is disclosed not as the master and king of his subjects
and servants, but as the Father in heaven of his children on earth. It
has however not merely deepened, it has been transformed, or rather it
is to be approached in a different mood, and therefore is revealed in
a new aspect: whereas in the beginning the body of worshippers,
whether it approached its god with prayer for deliverance from
calamities or for material blessings, approached him in order that
their desires might be fulfilled; in the end the worshipper is taught
that approach is possible only on renunciation of his own desires and
on acceptance of God's will. The centre of religion is transposed: it
is no longer man and his desires round which religion is to revolve.
The will of God is to be the centre, to which man is no longer to
gravitate unconsciously but to which he is deliberately to determine
himself. As in the solar system the force of gravity is but one, so in
the spiritual system that which holds all spiritual beings together
is the love which proceeds from God to his creatures and may
increasingly proceed from them to Him. It is the substitution of the
love of God for the desires of man which makes the new heaven and the
new earth.

From the point of view of evolution the important fact is that this
new aspect of the idea of God is not something merely superposed upon
the old: if it were simply superposed, it would not be evolved.
Neither is the disclosure, to the soul, of God as love, evolved from
the conception of Him as the being from whom men may seek the
fulfilment of their desires. To interpret the process of religious
evolution in this way would be to misinterpret it, in exactly the same
way as if we were to suppose that, only when the evolution of
v