a soul of this description is a thousand times more instructed in the knowledge of prayer than all the teachers themselves, and maysay, with the prophet, " I have more understanding than all my teachers." He speaks to his God as a friend to a friend; he is sorry for having offended him; he upbraids himself for not having, as yet, sufficient force to renounce all to please him; he takes no pride in the sublimity of his thoughts; he leaves his heart to speak, and gives way to all its tenderness before the only object of his love. Even when his mind wanders, his heart watches and speaks for him: his very disgusts become a prayer, through the feelings which are then excited in his heart: he is tenderly affected, he sighs, he is displeased with, and a burden to, himself: he feels the weight of his bonds, he exerts himself as if to break and throw them off; he a thousand times renews his protestations of fidelity; he blushes and is ashamed at always promising, and yet being continually faithless: such is the whole secret and the whole science of prayer. And what is there in all this beyond the reach of every believing soul?
Who had instructed the poor woman of Canaan in prayer? A stranger, and a daughter of Tyre and Sidon, who was unacquainted with the wonders of the law and the oracles of the prophets; who had not yet heard from the mouth of the Saviour the words of eternal life; who was still under the shadows of ignorance and of death: she prays, however; her love, her confidence, the desire of being granted, teach her to pray; her heart being touched, constitutes the whole merit and the whole sublimity of her prayer.
And surely, if, in order to pray, it were requisite to rise to those sublime states of prayer to which God exalteth some holy souls; if it were necessary to be wrapped in ecstasy, and transported even up to heaven, like Paul, there to hear those ineffable secrets which God exposeth not to man, and which it is not permitted, even to man himself, to reveal; or, like Moses upon the holy mountain, to be placed upon a cloud of glory, and, face to face, to see God; that is to say, if it were necessary to have attained to that degree of intimate union with the Lord, in which the soul, as if already freed from its body, springs up even into the bosom of its God; contemplates at leisure his infinite perfections; forgets, as I may say, its members which are still upon the earth; is no longer disturbed, nor even diverted by the phantoms of the senses; is fixed, and as if absorbed in the contemplation of the wonders and the grandeur of God; and already participating in his eternity, could count a whole age passed in that blessed state, as only a short and rapid moment; if, I say, it were necessary, in order to pray, to be favoured with these rare and excellent gifts of the Holy Spirit, you might tell us, like those new believers, of whom St. Paul makes mention, that you have not yet received them, and that you know not what is even that Spirit which communicates them.
But prayer is not a special gift set apart for privileged souls alone; it is a common duty imposed upon every believer; it is not
