gy is appropriate as a
conclusion, and serves to give an aspect of completeness. It sounds cold
and cheerless to end our prayer with 'evil.' But the question is not one
of feeling or of our notions of fitness, but purely one of criticism,
and the only evidence which has any right to be heard in settling the
text of the New Testament is dead against this clause. If we regard that
evidence, we are obliged to say that the doxology has no business here.
How it stands here is a question which may be answered satisfactorily.
When the Lord's Prayer came to be used in public worship, it was natural
to append to it a doxology, just as in chanting the psalms it became the
habit to repeat at the end of each the Gloria. This doxology, originally
written on the margin of the gospel, would gradually creep into the
text, and once there, was naturally retained.

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