prayer! Surrounded with so many opportunities of raising yourself to God, you have nothing to say to him when you come to appear in his presence? Ah! my brethren, how far removed must God be from a heart which finds it such a punishment to hold converse with him, and how little must that master and friend be loved, to whom they never wish to speak!
And behold the last and the principal cause of our incapacity in prayer. They know not how to pray and to speak to their God, because they do not love him. When the heart loves, it soon finds out how to communicate its feelings, and to affect the object of its love; it soon knows what it ought to say: alas! it cannot express all that it feels. Let us establish regularity once more in our hearts, my brethren; let us substitute God in place of the world; then shall our heart be no longer a stranger before God. It is the irregularity of our affections which is the soul cause of our incapacity in prayer; eternal riches can never be fervently asked when they are not loved; truths can never be well meditated upon when they are not relished; and little can be said to a God who is hardly known: favours which are not desired, and freedom from passions which are not hated, can never be very urgently solicited; in a word, prayer is the language of love; and we know not how ,to pray, because we know not how to love.
But, as you shall say, doth an inclination for prayer depend upon us? And how is it possible to pray, with disgusts and wanderings of the mind, which are not to be conquered, and which render it insupportable? Second pretext, drawn from the disgusts and the difficulties of prayer.
Part II. — One of the greatest excesses of sin is undoubtedly that backwardness, and, I may say, that natural dislike which we have to prayer. Man, innocent, would have founded his whole delight in holding converse with God. All creatures would have been as an open book, where he would have incessantly meditated upon his works and his wonders; the impressions of the senses, under the command of reason, would never have been able to turn him aside, in spite of himself, from the delight and the familiarity of his presence; his whole life would have been one continued contemplation of the truth, and his whole happiness in his innocence would have been founded on his continual communications with the Lord, and the certainty that he would never forsake him.
Man must therefore be highly corrupted, and sin must have made strange alterations in us, to turn into a punishment what ought to be our happiness. It is, however, only too true, that we almost all bear in our nature this backwardness and this dislike to prayer: and upon these is founded the most universal pretext which is opposed to the discharge of this duty, so essential to Christian piety. Even persons, to whom the habit of prayer ought to be rendered more pleasing and more familiar, by the practice of virtue, continually complain of the disgusts and of the constant wanderings which they experience in this holy exercise; insomuch, that, look-
