1. This, then, is the first thing, that prayer may rightly be addressed to each person of the Divine Trinity separately. No doubt most prayer should be addressed to God the Father, as the Fountain and Source of all things. And perhaps there is some need of a caution in these days lest this be lost sight of. There has been on the part of some a great leaning towards addressing prayer mainly to God the Son. Of the lawfulness and fitness of such prayer we may not doubt. It is God’s will “that all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father”. And if we believe, with the Church universal, that Jesus Christ is “equal to the Father as touching His Godhead,” plainly worship is His right. We dare worship none but God. But we worship Jesus, because we believe Him to be God. Yet it is no less true that to address our prayers mainly to Him may be a dishonouring of the Father, even as it is contrary to the spirit of the Bible and the usage of the Church.
That worship was directed to each of the three Persons of the Godhead in the ante-Nicene Church, and that the tribute of Divine honours to the Son and the Holy Ghost as God was not the addition or invention of later ages, has been conclusively proved by Bingham in the Antiquities of the Christian Church, bk. xiii ch. 2:, and by Dr. Liddon in the Bampton Lectures on The Divinity of our Lord, pp. 387-422 (11th edition). S. Ignatius bids the Roman Christians put up supplications to the Lord that “he . . . may be found a sacrifice to God”; in S. Polycarp’s Epistle to the .Philippians, the Father and the Son are united in benediction and intercession; in the Apologies of S. Justin Martyr and Tertullian, the adoration of Christ is asserted and justified; Origen, with occasional inconsistency of language, insists upon the worship of Jesus Christ, illustrates it by his own personal example, and bases it upon the truth of His Godhead. And in the early Christian hymns, such as the Tersanctus, the Gloria in Excelsis, the Gloria Patri, and the “Hail! gladdening light,” the worship offered to the Father and the Son is offered also to the Holy Ghost. [Note: A. J. Worlledge, Prayer, 95.]
Speaking of the famous Dr. Kidd of Aberdeen, Prof. Bain says: “The first occasion when I resumed attending the church, I was taken all of a heap with listening to his first prayer: the easy flow of language, the choiceness of his topics, and the brevity of the whole, came upon me like a new revelation.” Dr. Bain also tells us that it was a common habit with the Doctor, in his prayer, to “address the three persons in the Godhead in consecutive order, adapting the petitions to the specific personality of each,” and, he adds, “I never heard this done by any other preacher”. [Note: J. Stark, Dr. Kidd of Aberdeen, 103.]
2. But it should be clearly understood that in addressing the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit, we address the One Eternal God under the eternal distinctions of His Triune Essence. To the Church of Israel, the revelation on which worship rested was summed up in the sentence, “The Lord our God is one Lord”.
To the Church Catholic, the name of the one Lord our God is revealed as He is in His Triune Essence: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. That revelation could be made by the God-Man alone. In His eternal Person, He united the untreated and created natures, and thus unveiled to man the inner eternal distinctions in the Divine nature, which are revealed also as strictly compatible with the Divine Unity. The struggle with Arianism and the Creed of Nicaea really meant the reassertion of the unity of God, and “for the modern world, the Christian doctrine of God remains as the only safeguard in reason for a permanent theistic belief.”
Christian prayer is prayer to God through Christ. It is prayer to our Father in heaven; yet our prayer does not go to the Father in such sense as if the Son and the Holy Spirit were excluded, as if it dared not apply to them. To the Son also we may and ought to pray, as we ought also to call upon the Holy Spirit; and the Church has ever, yea from its beginning, done both. But though one or the other of the persons is preponderantly present to the consciousness or the imagination, it still remains the three-one God to whom prayer is addressed. [Note: H. Martensen, Christian Ethics, i.173.]
All invocation of Jesus is in the last resort adoration of God, who is revealed to us in Him. Any additional honour, as it might appear to be, would, according to His own clear declaration, be an impairment. Not always has the Christian Church, nor have its individual members, maintained the chaste reserve of the Church of the first age and its members; not always have they maintained the same confidence. Prayer to the Saviour has supplanted prayer to the Father, and on the other hand it has been suspected of being unchristian. Heartfelt confessions in truthful biographies, together with the prayers and hymns appointed for congregational devotion, show plainly what important rights the individual and likewise the separate circle have in this sacred concern of faith, but also how unchangeable are those limits which are essential to the religion. To genuine prayer, the mere supposition that the object of its trust is not a unity is intolerable; but for it, Jesus is with equal certainty united to the Father in such wise that, while there is an invocation of the Father, there is also an invocation of Jesus, with a meaning of its own which falls under no suspicion. [Note: T. Haering, The Christian Faith, ii. 665.]
Some time since I was two Sundays in an important parish of the north. Thirteen hymns were sung. In all these there was but one stanza of one hymn which was addressed to the Eternal Father. To Him was addressed one seventy-eighth part of the Spiritual Songs of His people. That one stanza invoked Him as the Giver of dew and of dewy sleep. Everything else, except certain eulogies on the Church, was addressed to our Lord, and almost entirely to His Human Nature. Now when we consider that our Lord’s mission was, as He described it, to gather “true worshippers to the Father,” we must, whatever allowances or explanations we make, admit that the Divine offices of those two Sundays lacked proportionateness. [Note: Archbishop Benson, The Seven Gifts, 168.]
