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 mankind are shuddering with fear, ' look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is at hand.’

But Jesus Christ comes to each of us when our life ends. When that ' Last Day ’ of our own, then, is near, and Our Lord knocks at our door to call us, we must be ready to receive Him with joy and to say 'Thy Kingdom come! for I desire that all there is in me which is mortal may be swallowed up by life.'

But who amongst us really longs for the full reign of God? Which of us says, 'Thy Kingdom come ’ really heartily? And yet it is for this that we are prepared by the petition to Our Father in heaven. That is our habitation and our home, because it is our Father’s.

We are, in fact, not in good faith when we say ‘ Thy kingdom come ’: — or rather, which is the same thing at bottom, 'May Thy kingdom come for us.' And what stifles this desire, which ought to be so natural to every Christian, is our love of this world and its pleasures. We love our life here, full as it is of every kind of evil; and, still worse, full as it is of sin, which is the greatest of all evils.

Let us, then, break these bonds and say, ‘ Thy