The petition, which, as far as the science of religion enables us to judge, was the first petition made by man, was for deliverance from evil. The next, in historical order, was for forgiveness of sins; and, then, when society had come to be settled on an agricultural basis and dependent on the harvest, prayer was offered 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.