straint; forsake it on the first symptom of disgust; make no exertion to reduce and familiarize their mind to it; and far from considering prayer as being rendered only more necessary to them, by their invincible repugnance to it, they regard that very repugnance as a legal excuse, which dispenses them altogether from it.
But how find time in the world, you will say, to make so long and so frequent a use of prayer? You, my dear hearer, not find time to pray? But wherefore is time given to you, but to entreat of God to forget your crimes, to look upon you with eyes of compassion, and to place you one day among the number of his holy? You have not time to pray? But you have not time, then, to be a Christian; for, a man who prays not, is a man who has no God, no worship, and no hope. You have not time to pray? But prayer is the beginning of all good; and if you do not pray, you have not yet performed a single work for eternal life. Ah! my brethren, is time for ever wanting to solicit the favours of the earth, to importune the master, to besiege those who are in place, to bestow upon pleasures, or upon idleness? What useless moments! What languid and tiresome days, through the mere gloom which ever accompanies idleness! What time lost in vain ceremonials, in idle conversations, in boundless gaming, in fruitless subjections, in grasping at chimeras which move farther and farther from us! Great God! and time is wanted to ask heaven of thee, to appease thy wrath, and to supplicate thine eternal mercies! How humbly, O my God, must salvation be estimated, when time is wanted to entreat of thy mercy to save us! And how much are we to be deplored, to find so many moments for the world, and to be unable to find a single one for eternity! Second cause of the disgusts and of the wanderings of your prayers — the little use of prayer itself.
It is true, my brethren, that this reason is not so general but that souls, the most faithful to prayer, are often seen to experience all those disgusts and those wanderings of which I speak! but, I say, that these disgusts proceed from the wisdom of God, who means to purify them, and who leads them by that path, only in order to fulfil his eternal designs of mercy upon them. Last reason— that consequently, far from being repulsed by what they find gloomy and disagreeable in prayer, they ought to persevere in it with even more fidelity than if the Lord had shed upon them the most abundant and the most sensible consolations.
First. Because you ought to consider these disgusts as the just punishment of your past infidelities. Is it not reasonable that God make you expiate the criminal voluptuousness of your worldly life by the disgusts and the sorrows of piety? Weakness of temperament does not perhaps permit you to punish, by corporeal sufferings, the licentiousness of your past manners: is it not just that God supply that, by the punishment, and the inward afflictions of the mind? Would you pretend to pass in an instant from the pleasures of the world to those of grace; from the viands of Egypt to the milk and honey of the land of promise, without the Lord having first made you to undergo the barrenness and the fatigues of
