This little work was written during Pere Grou's residence in England, probably about the year 1800. His editor says it was considered "one of the most precious fruits of his life of silence and labor," in that interval of twelve years that he spent at Lulworth.
In 1817, fourteen years after his death, an English translation of it was made by a Jesuit father, which, so far as we know, has passed entirely out of existence.
It might perhaps, at first thought, be deemed unnecessary to publish an exposition of the Lord's Prayer, that prayer so simple that every child knows it by heart. But when we consider that it has been daily repeated all over the Christian world for nearly two thousand years, and yet it is always fresh; that nothing has ever been added to it, or taken from it; that it is the model after which all Christian prayer has been formulated, - must we not admit, that, simple as its words are, it has a fathomless depth of meaning, an exhaustless store of holy treasure?
It is only the divers who find the pearls and the buried wealth of the sea: so it is only those who, in prayerful silence and solitude, search out the hidden things of God, who discover and disclose to us truths we should never otherwise have known. Thus Pere Grou has revealed in this familiar prayer of our Lord a fullness, a richness, and a profound application to every human life, which gives it new beauty and power.
The late Rev. Dr Ewer, in the Lent of 1881, examined this translation in manuscript, it having been then just finished, and was so much impressed by it, he read it for the instruction at Even Song, using it two special days each week. We trust that all who love the Lord's Prayer will again welcome this remarkable exposition of its several petitions, and will find it an aid to a higher and holier life.
- Ellen M. Fogg
- from The Christian Sanctified by the Lord's Prayer, by Father Jean Nicolas Grou