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ever-ready willingness to heal and comfort and save others, confirms our faith and reanimates our hope. But meditation, to be fruitful, must go deeper than the mind; the heart, too, must be waked to action. The mind should minister to the heart as does a nurse to a little child, collecting and preparing food for meditation, and masticating it herself before feeding it to her charge. But if the nurse not only masticate but swallow the food, her charge will starve and die. The will is, as it were, the customs officer at the city gate, but if instead of levying just toll he confiscate all merchandise, a famine in the city, in the heart, is sure to follow. To meditate with the mind alone as one might ponder a mathematical problem, would prove as barren of results as the labors of a huntsman whose dog should not only catch but devour the game, for the function of the mind is to discover and grasp the truth and lay it at the feet of its master, the heart. Nor can our heart's best emotions be elicited without much labor and great patience, for they are as green wood and must be set upon the fire of God's love long and closely ere sputtering resistance and clouds of smoke give place to clear flame. Yet prayer without emotion is labor as vain as that Our Lord described when He said: "And some seed fell upon a rock and as soon as it was sprung up it withered away because it had no moisture." The fourth part should be thanksgiving. Be our needs ever so great, be our prayer answered or not, we must never fail to return thanks to God, who knows our wants much better than we do ourselves.