Oh, yes! if you knew how to pray, and loved prayer, how good, useful, fruitful, and meritorious would be your life!
Nothing so elevates the soul as prayer.
God, so condescending to the soul, raises it with Him to the regions of light and love, and then, the prayer finished, the soul returns to its daily duties with a more enlightened mind, a more earnest will. It is filled with radiance divine, and sheds of its abundance upon all who approach.
If you would succeed in your study, with the success that sanctifies, pray before commencing.
If you would succeed in your [pg 107] intercourse with others, pray before becoming intimate.
Nothing so smooths and sweetens life as Prayer.
There is the solitary prayer, when the soul isolated from all creatures is alone with God and feels thus towards Him: "God and I;" God to love; I to adore, praise, glorify, thank.
God to bestow, I humbly to receive, to renounce, ask, hope, submit!...
Ah! who can tell all that passes between the soul and its God?
There is the united prayer of two friends, bound together by a holy friendship, their desires and thoughts are one, and as one they present themselves before God, crying, "Have mercy upon me!"