time, the dreadful sentence first pronounced against guilty man is still recorded against us. [1]
In treating this subject, therefore, the pastor will exert himself to impress on the minds of the faithful, that if these misfortunes and miseries are incidental to man, the fault is entirely his own; that he must labour and toil to procure the necessaries of life, but that unless God bless his labours, all his hopes must prove illusory, all his exertions fruitless: " Neither he that planteth is any thing, nor he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase." [2] " Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it." [3]
The pastor, therefore, will teach that those things which are necessary to human existence, or, at least, to its comforts, are almost innumerable; and this knowledge of our wants and weaknesses will stimulate the faithful to have recourse to their heavenly Father, humbly to solicit every blessing of soul and body, of heaven and of earth. They will imitate the example of the prodigal, who, when he began to experience want in a strange land, unable to obtain even the husks of swine, on which to satisfy the cravings of hunger, at length, returning to himself, saw that, for the evils that oppressed him, he could expect no remedy from anyone but from his father. [4] They will also have recourse to prayer with greater confidence, if they reflect on the goodness of God, whose ears are always open to the cries of his children. Whilst he exhorts us to ask for bread, he promises to bestow it abundantly on us, if we ask it as we ought: by exhorting, he enjoins it as a duty: by enjoining it as a duty, he pledges himself to give it; and by pledging himself to give it, he inspires us with the confident expectation of obtaining it.
When the minds of the faithful are thus animated and encouraged, the pastor will next evolve the objects of this petition; and, first, what is the nature of the bread for which it prays. In the sacred Scriptures the word "bread" has a variety of meanings, but particularly the two following: first, whatever is necessary for the sustenance of the body, and for our other corporeal wants; secondly, whatever the divine bounty has bestowed on us for the life and salvation of the soul. In this petition, then, according to the interpretation and authority of the holy Fathers, we ask those succours of which we stand in need in this life; and those, therefore, who say that such prayers are unlawful, deserve no attention. Besides the unanimous concurrence of the fathers, many examples in the Old and New Testaments refute the error. Jacob, pledging a vow to heaven, prayed thus: " If God shall be with me, and shall keep me in the way by which I walk, and shall give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, and I shall return prosperously to my father's house, the Lord shall be my God; and this stone, which I have set up for a title, shall be called the house of God; and of all
