Our service of to-day is a service of thanksgiving. We are not accustomed to give the name thanksgiving to the services of the various Christian festivals which we celebrate as members of Christ's Church, and which are laid down for us in our Prayer Book; but though we do not use the name, we are not the less engaged in thanksgiving in any due observance of those hallowed days. They all, in one way or another, bring before us the different steps in the great work of enlightening and saving mankind which God has already wrought in His Son Jesus Christ. Their first and clearest use is to rouse our hearts into thankfulness for the supreme blessings from God's hands which we have inherited as heirs of the kingdom.

But indeed no prayer, no worship can in strict truth be called Christian which does not spring out of thankfulness, and which, in spirit at least, if not in words, is not mingled with thanksgiving. A Christian prayer is not a cry to an unknown Power in the distance, but a trustful pleading of children with a Father whom they have learned to know as a Father indeed by the sending of His Son. A Christian prayer is no mere pursuit of good things now in the keeping of One able and willing to let us have them; it is full of the remembrance of His well-tried love, and therefore in all that it seeks from Him seeks yet more Himself.