F. D. Maurice

The Lord's Prayer

Nine Sermons

First published
1848
Length
35,000 words, about 3 hours' reading

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Maurice preached these sermons between February and April 1848, while a revolution in France brought down a monarchy and unrest spread across Europe. “I wished in these Sermons,” he wrote, “to connect the Lord’s Prayer with the thoughts which are most likely to be occupying us at this time.”

Taking the prayer clause by clause, from “Our Father” to the closing doxology, he asks what it means to pray for the coming of God’s kingdom and the doing of His will while earthly kingdoms are falling, and how the study of passing events might make worship more real.

Contents

The one-line summaries are guides drafted with the help of AI, not Maurice’s words.

  1. Advertisement

    Maurice explains that he wrote these sermons to connect the Lord’s Prayer with the pressing concerns of 1848, hoping to deepen his readers’ worship.

  2. Sermon I. Our Father Which Art in Heaven

    Praying ‘Our’ claims kinship with every outcast and enemy we would rather disown, while ‘Father’ names an actual relation Christ’s redemption secured, not a private feeling that comes and goes.

  3. Sermon II. Hallowed Be Thy Name

    Before asking for bread or forgiveness, the prayer stops to hallow God’s name, since every gross superstition begins in mistaking his character, a fault only Christ’s own life can cure.

  4. Sermon III. Thy Kingdom Come

    Amid the revolutions of 1848, three different hopes cluster around this prayer—a better earthly order, a future rest beyond death, an inward reign of truth—and Christ’s kingdom fulfils them all.

  5. Sermon IV. Thy Will Be Done

    As Europe’s revolutions collapse into disorder, the petition teaches that God’s will is not bare sovereignty but active, self-giving love, fully disclosed in the obedience of the Cross.

  6. Sermon V. Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

    Read beside the manna in the wilderness and Christ’s refusal to turn stones into bread, this petition asks only for daily subsistence, not luxury, and binds every asker to the needs of the whole human family.

  7. Sermon VI. Forgive Us Our Debts

    Every debt confessed here is ultimately owed to God, and the prayer’s hardest word is not the asking but the requirement that our own forgiving must match the mercy we ask to receive.

  8. Sermon VII. Lead Us Not into Temptation

    God leads every life, as he led Christ’s, into some wilderness of trial, so this petition is not a plea to escape testing but a confession of dependence shared by invalid, scholar and statesman alike.

  9. Sermon VIII. Deliver Us from Evil

    This universal cry against suffering is answered by tracing every evil to a single root, self-will, which Christ’s sacrifice exposes and is even now overcoming for the whole race.

  10. Sermon IX. For Thine Is the Kingdom

    The doxology counters our itch to claim the social order, our own powers, and humanity’s ideal destiny as achievements of our own, ascribing kingdom, power, and glory only to the Father.

About this digital edition

How the text was made, and the printer's errors corrected

The original book

The Lord’s Prayer: Nine Sermons by Frederick Denison Maurice.

This edition

Produced 2026-11-01 from a page scan of the printed book, as part of a project to make F. D. Maurice’s works freely available in every useful digital form. The guiding principle throughout was fidelity to the printed text: Maurice’s own spelling, capitalization, punctuation, ligatures, and typography rule, except where a printing error was identified and deliberately emended (each such change is listed below).

How this text was made

The transcription pipeline combines automated tools, AI models, and page-by-page human review:

  • OCR and conversion. The scan was OCRed (ocrmypdf/Tesseract) and converted to structured text (marker), then cleaned by a language model working chunk by chunk.
  • The cleanup model’s changes were not reviewed against the print in this edition. Footnotes were renumbered uniformly, but not verified against the printed page in this edition.
  • Quotation marks were normalized to the printer’s own conventions, but were not checked for pairing or inspected against the page image in this edition.
  • Italics were not restored in this edition. The OCR text layer records none, so the printed book’s italics are missing here.
  • Small capitals and ligatures (æ, œ) were not checked against the print in this edition, and the OCR drops many ligatures.
  • Greek was not checked word by word against the print in this edition, and the OCR reads Greek type poorly.
  • A whole-book audit by a language model checked structure, headings, footnotes, and Greek; its findings were reviewed by a human editor against the print before any were applied.

The text contains 1 footnote and 18 small-caps renderings of the print.

Emendations

Places where this edition deliberately differs from the printed book, each a correction of an apparent printing error, verified against the page image:

  • none

Printer’s oddities that are not errors were left exactly as printed (including inconsistent proper-name spellings and the original’s own numbering gaps).