_Stay with Me_ for a few moments at midday, when the glare of the world and its rush and its din are fiercest. Turn off the crowded pavement into the quiet church. “Come apart ... and rest a little.”[25] _Stay with Me_ because it is towards evening and the day is now far spent. There will be no more visitors for Me to-day, none through the long hours of the night. Stay with Me because it is towards evening. O Lover of men, so lonely, so forsaken, if Your object in staying with us day and night was to win our love, have You not failed? Has it been worth Your while to work miracle after miracle to produce Your Real Presence upon the altar? Have I made it worth Your while to be there _for me_? Jesus, dear Jesus, I bury my face in my hands; I know of no heart more ungrateful, more callous than my own. I have been miserably unmindful of Your Presence here _for me_. I have let self, pleasure, troubles even--anything and everything furnish an excuse for keeping away from You and neglecting You in that sacramental life which is lived here _for me_. [21] John xvii. [22] Luke xxii. [23] Matt. xxvi. [24] John xvi. [25] Mark vi. V. WHAT THINGS? “Art Thou a stranger and hast not known the things that have been done in these days?” To whom He said: “What things?”--_Luke_ xxiv. 18, 19. Some of us, maybe, are deterred from visiting our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament by a false conception of what a visit should be. We suppose that the occupations which fill our heads and our hands from morning till night must all be laid aside at the church door and sternly forbidden entrance, much in the same way as we bid our dog lie down in the porch and wait for us. We read that St. Bernard thus dismissed all secular thoughts, and we conclude--though his biographer does not say so--that they returned at the end of his prayer, _and not before_. Self-mastery such as this demands an effort to which few of us feel equal. Do what they will, the mind of the doctor and the lawyer will run more or less upon their anxious cases, the student’s head will be full of his examination, the mother’s of her household cares. These thoughts if indeliberate will be at least persistent, and if quite deliberate will become sinful. In either case they render prayer an impossibility--hence we stay away. Now do we find this view of prayer borne out by the practice of God’s servants? Of David in perplexity and trouble we read: “And the Philistines coming spread themselves in the valley of Raphaim. And David consulted the Lord, saying: Shall I go up to the Philistines? and wilt Thou deliver them into my hand? And the Lord said to David: Go up, for I will surely deliver the Philistines into thy hand.... And the Philistines came up again.... And David consulted the Lord: Shall I go up against the Philistines?... He answered: Go not up against them.”[26]