settling your imagination, of weakening your faith, and of filling your mind with anxiety and trouble; when we should judge of the security of this state merely from what you continually tell us, that you are incapable of arranging yourself for prayer, and that, on your part, it is always attended with an insupportable disgust and weariness; I say, that, for these reasons alone, the most innocent worldly life is a life of sin and reprobation; a life for which there is no salvation: for salvation is promised solely to prayer; salvation is not attainable but through the aid of prayer; salvation is granted only to perseverance in prayer; consequently, every life which places an invincible obstacle in the way of prayer, can have no pretensions to salvation. Now, you are fully sensible yourselves, my brethren, that a life of dissipation, of gaming, of pleasure, and of public places, puts an essential obstacle in the way of prayer; that it places in your heart, in your imagination, in your senses, an invincible disgust at prayer, an unsettledness incompatible with the spirit of prayer: you continually complain of this; you even make use of it as a pretext not to pray; and from thence be assured that there is no salvation for the worldly life, even the most innocent; for, wherever prayer is impossible, salvation must likewise be so. First reason of the disgusts and of the wanderings of our prayers — the lukewarmness and the infidelity of our life.
The second is our little usage of prayer. We pray with disgust, because we seldom pray. For, first, it is the practice alone of prayer which will gradually calm your mind, which will insensibly banish from it the images of the world and of vanity, which will disperse all those clouds which produce all the disgusts and the wanderings of your prayers. Secondly, you must ask for a long time before you can obtain; you must press, solicit, and even importune; the sweets and the consolations of prayer are the fruit and the reward of prayer itself. Thirdly, there must be familiarity in order to find pleasure in it. If you seldom pray, the Lord will be a strange and unknown God to you, as I may say, before whom you will feel yourself embarrassed, and under a kind of restraint; with whom you will never experience those overflowings of heart, that sweet confidence, that holy freedom, which familiarity alone bestows, and which constitute the whole pleasure of the divine intercourse. God requires to be known, in order to be loved. The world loses by being examined; the surface, and the first glance of it are alone smiling. Search deeper, and it is no longer but emptiness, vanity, anxious care, agitation, and misery. But the Lord must be tasted, says the prophet, in order to feel how good he is. The more you know, the more you love him: the more you unite yourself to him, the more do you feel that there is no true happiness on the earth but that of knowing and of loving him.
It is the use, therefore, of prayer, which alone can render prayer pleasing. Thus we see that the generality of persons who complain of the disgusts and of the wanderings of their prayers, seldom pray; think this important duty fulfilled when they have bestowed upon the Lord a few hasty moments of thoughtlessness and re-
