Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
God's own Spirit, together with God's Utterance and God's Rationale — Utterance possessing rationale, rationale expressed through the Utterance, and Spirit uniting the pair — Jesus Christ our Lord, marked out for his new disciples of the new covenant a new form of prayer. For it was fitting that in this respect too new wine should be stored in new skins, and a new patch stitched onto a new garment. As for everything that had gone before, it was either changed, as circumcision was; or supplemented, as the rest of the law was; or fulfilled, as prophecy was; or brought to perfection, as faith itself was. [2] The new grace of God has renewed everything from the carnal into the spiritual, by overlaying it with the gospel, which strikes out the whole of the old order — and in this gospel our Lord Jesus Christ was shown to be God's Spirit, God's Utterance, and God's Rationale: Spirit, through which he held power; Utterance, through which he instructed; Rationale, through which he arrived. So then, the prayer Christ instituted was assembled from three elements: from Spirit, from which it draws its power; from Utterance, through which it is voiced; from Rationale, through which it... [3] John too had taught his disciples to pray; but everything of John's was laid down merely to prepare the way for Christ, until, once Christ had grown greater — just as John himself had foretold that Christ must increase and he himself decrease — the whole work of that preliminary ministry, along with the Spirit itself, passed over to the Lord. That is why there is no record of the words in which John taught men to pray: earthly things had to yield to heavenly ones. "He who is of the earth," it says, "speaks earthly things, and he who comes from heaven speaks what he has seen." And what belonging to the Lord Christ is not heavenly — including this very discipline of prayer? [4] Let us then consider, blessed ones, his heavenly wisdom, beginning with the precept to pray in secret, by which he both demanded a man's faith — that he be confident that the sight and hearing of Almighty God reach even indoors and into a hidden place — and required a modesty of faith, so that one who trusts God hears and sees him everywhere should offer his devotion to him alone. [5] The wisdom in the next precept, likewise, bears on faith and the modesty of faith, if we do not think we must approach the Lord with a marching column of words, since we are certain that he takes thought unbidden for his own. [6] And yet this brevity — insofar as it serves a third degree of wisdom — rests upon the weight of a rich and blessed exposition, and the more tightly it is compressed in words, the more it is expanded in meanings. For it embraces not only the proper functions of prayer — reverence of God, or a man's petitions — but almost the whole discourse of the Lord, the whole record of his teaching, so that in truth the prayer contains an abridgment of the entire gospel.