It is good always to begin and end our meditations with prayer. It is good, too, at times, to turn our meditation into contemplation; in simply making real to ourselves His presence who has said, "Lo, I am with you alway." (St. Matt. xxviii. 20.) "If any man ... open the door, I will come in ... and ... sup with him, and he with Me." (Rev. iii. 20.) Let me beg of all who read this chapter and who have never done so, to make trial of its recommendations through the Lenten season. Do not be discouraged, though you fail many times, though again and again you find your thoughts wandering to the ends of the earth. Drive them back to their appointed work every time. By and by you will find them less inclined to stray. The hard task will become a pleasure, and you will be amply rewarded for your pains when you find Divine truth growing more and more clear and precious, when you find yourself better and better able to turn away from painful and unprofitable thoughts, to take refuge in the Lord's presence from the provoking of all men, and to rest under the shadow of the Great Rock in the weary land. Then your heart shall not be "like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh," but rather "as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river; and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit." (Jer. xvii. 6, 8.) Jer. xvii. Rev. iii. _THIRD THURSDAY IN LENT._ _PRAYER._ THE Christian is to pray without ceasing; that is, he is always to be in the spirit of prayer. He is, by God's help, to strive to keep himself in such a state that he can at any moment lift up his heart and mind to his Heavenly Father, and that as much in the round of his daily business as in his closet. He is to strive to carry about with him an habitual sense of the presence of God, and of dependence upon Him for all things. "Use lessens marvel," says the old proverb, and the saying is true. The most surprising discoveries in science, the most wonderful applications of these discoveries to the arts, cease to astonish us in a very short time. There is nothing in the Arabian Nights which sounds more incredible than that the movement of a wheel turned by a waterfall should light up a great city. Yet every child has become used to the electric light, and thinks no more marvel of it than his grandfather did of a candle.