Henry said he felt it most in a big crowd of people.
“Yes,” answered Ruth; “then you feel how little all this is, and the vast, big life above it all.”
“You don’t mean, Ruth,” I asked “that you feel the crowd to be a little thing?”
“Oh, no,” she answered. “I feel it in the crowd.”
Henry said: “To be among people always arouses that feeling of sympathy.”
There are many ways of praying, I said; to speak certain words that aroused in us the prayer-feeling was a good way; but that the words were only to awaken the feeling in us, and were worth nothing by themselves. If one could feel the prayer without any words whatever, it would be just as well. Florence thought it very hard not to get to repeat words by rote. Henry said he always made a particular effort to think of the meaning of the words as he said them.
“I don’t believe,” said Virginia, “that it is so much thought as feeling. I don’t always think of the meaning of those words when I say them, but I get from them the feeling that I must have, to go to sleep.”
“And now,” I went on, “it seems especially important to get into this frame of mind just before we go to sleep. For during sleep it seems as if the bigger self were working for us. And as we go to sleep, so shall we be next day. I think that if, as you fall asleep, you ask—your vast self—for strength, for the power to do whatever you know you must do next day, and to solve whatever problems you have to solve, and then get the deep sense of prayer, you usually awaken with the strength you need, and your problems solved. Is it not so?”
Virginia said she always found that if she wanted to learn something, she had only to read it over to herself at night, without learning it, and in the morning, when she awoke, she knew it. Ruth said she found it so; that she always felt next day according to the way she had fallen asleep at night. They had various opinions. Marian said it did not matter how she fell asleep at night; if things went well in the morning, the whole day went well; if ill, then the day went ill. She loves the power of each new day. Alfred said he thought that our brains worked for us in sleep, because then the mind was free from all obstructing thoughts.
I repeated for them a little prayer I had written for a baby: