PATERNOSTER (Lat. "Our Father") called also TILE LORD'S PRAYER, a short form of prayer suggested or prescribed by our Lord to his disciples (Matt. vi. 9-13, Luke xi.
1-4) as the model according to which, in contrast with the prayers of the Pharisees, their petitions ought to be composed. The paternoster has been accepted as, by excellence, the form of 'Christian prayer. It formed part of all the ancient litut?gies. So sacred, indeed, was its use, that it was reserved from pagans and catechumens under what is known as the discipline of the secret. The early fathers—Origen, Tertullian, Cvprian refer to it in terms which show that even then it was a recognized form of private prayer. It was recited in baptism, and one of the privileges of the baptized was the use of the paternoster. More than one of the fathers, and very many later writers, have devoted special treatises to the exposition of this prayer, as embracing all the fitting and legitimate objects of the prayer of a Christian. The catechism of the council of Trent contains a detailed exposition and commentary of it, and in all the services, not only of the Roman missal, breviary, ritual, processional, and ordinal, but in all the occasional services prescribed from time to time, it is invariably introduced. In the rosary (q.v.) of
the virgin Mary, it is combined with the hail Mary (whence the larger beads of the "rosary" are sometimes called paternosters), and perhaps the most usual of the shorter devotions among Roman Catholics is the recitation of the "pater," with one or more "Ave Marks, concluding with the doxology. The paternoster as commonly used by Protestants concludes with 'the clause, "for thine is the kingdom, and„ the power, and the glory for ever. Amen." This clause is not used by Roman Catholics. Of the two gospels—that of Matthew and that of Luke—in which the prayer is contained, that of Luke has not this clause; and even in the gospel of Matthew it is found only in the later MSS., in which it cannot be doubted that it is a modern interpolation. It was retained, however, in Luther's German translation, and in the authorized version, whence its use became common among Protestants. Many polyglot collections of the paternoster have been published from the 16th c. downwards, the most remarkable of which are those of John Chamberlayne in 150 languages (1715), of Conrad Gesner in 200 (1748), and that of Padre Hervaz in 307 (1787).