"Meditation, as a part of mental prayer" says St. Francis of Sales, "is an attentive thought voluntarily repeated or entertained in the mind to excite the will to holy and salutary affections and resolutions" It differs from mere study in its object. We study to improve our minds and to store up information; we meditate to move the will to pray and to embrace what is good. We study that we may know; we meditate that we may pray.
"In mental prayer," says St. Alphonsus, "meditation is the needle, which only passes through that it may draw after it the golden thread, which is composed of affections, resolutions, and petitions."
As soon as you feel an impulse to pray while meditating, give way to it at once in the best way you can, by devout acts and petitions; in other words, begin your conversation with God on the subject about which you have been thinking.
la order to help the mind in this pious exercise we must have some definite subject of thought upon which it is well to read either a text of Holy Scripture or a few lines out of some other holy book; for instance, "The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius," " The Following of Christ," "The Spiritual Combat"; Challoner's "Think Well On't"; St. Alphonsus Liguori's "Devout Reflections," "The Way of Salvation," "The Love of Christ," and "The Blessed Eucharist"; St. Francis of Sales' " Introduction to a Devout Life," "Meditations for Retreats," and other works; Bishop Hedley's "Retreat"; Cochem's "Meditations on the Four Last Things"; Baxter's "Meditations for Every Day in the Year"; any one of the popular books of meditation
