has much to say concerning the duty and blessedness of prayer, and
Himself spent much time in prayer, yet never, so far as we know, did He
ask for the prayers of others. "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to
have you, that he might sift you as wheat: but I made supplication for
thee, that thy faith fail not." So did Jesus pray for His disciples; but
we never read that they prayed for Him, or that He asked for Himself a
place in their prayers. How significant the silence is we learn when we
turn to the Epistles of St. Paul and to the experience of the saints.
"Brethren, pray for us"--this is the token in almost every Epistle. In
the long, lone fight of life even the apostle's heart would have failed
him had not the prayers of unknown friends upheld him as with unseen
hands. There is no stronger instinct of the Christian heart than the
plea for remembrance at the throne of God. "Pray for me, will you?" we
cry, when man's best aid seems as a rope too short to help, yet long
enough to mock imprisoned miners in their living tomb. But the cry which
is so often ours was never Christ's.

It has further been remarked that, intimate as was Christ's intercourse
with His disciples, He never joined in prayer with them.[17] He prayed
in their presence, He prayed for them, but never with them. "It came to
pass, as He was praying in a certain place, that when He ceased, one of
His disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us to pray, even as John also
taught his disciples. And He said unto them, When ye pray, say----."
Then follows what we call "The Lord's Prayer." But, properly speaking,
this was not the Lord's prayer; it was the disciples' prayer: "When _ye_
pray, say------." And when we read the prayer again, we see why it could
not be His. How could He who knew no sin pray, saying, "Forgive us our
sins"? The true "Lord's Prayer" is to be found in the seventeenth
chapter of St. John's Gospel. And throughout that prayer the holy
Suppliant has nothing to confess, nothing to regret. He knows that the