had done this violence to myself, I found far greater peace and joy than when I prayed with regale and rapture. If our Lord then bore so long with me in all my wickedness, why should any one despair, however wicked he may be? Let him have been ever so wicked up till now, he will not remain in his wickedness so many years as I did after receiving so many graces from our Lord. And this more I will say,--prayer was the true door by which our Lord distributed out all His grace so liberally to me. Prayer and trust. I used indeed to pray for help: but I see now that I committed all the time the fatal mistake of not putting my whole trust in His Majesty. I should have utterly and thoroughly distrusted and detested and suspected myself. I sought for help. I sometimes took great pains to get it. But I did not understand of how little use all that is unless we root utterly all confidence out of ourselves, and place it at once, and for ever, and absolutely in God. Those were eighteen miserable years. (4) _Aridity in Prayer_.--Let no one weary or lose heart in prayer because of aridity. For the Hearer of prayer comes in all such cases very late. But at last He comes. And though He confessedly comes late, He correspondingly makes up to the soul for all His delays, and rewards her on the spot for all her toil, and dryness, and discouragement of many years. I have great pity on those who give way and lose all this through not being taught to persevere in prayer. It is a bad beginning, and very prejudicial to proficiency in prayer, to use it for the gust and consolation that a man receives at the time. I know by my own experience, that he who determines to pray, not much heeding either immediate comfort or dejection, he has got into one of the best secrets of prayer. I am troubled to hear that grave men, and men of learning and understanding, complain that God does not give them sensible devotion. It proceeds from ignorance of the true life of prayer, and from not carrying the cross into prayer as into all the rest of the spiritual life. He who begins to pray should be well told that he begins to plant a fine garden in very bad soil; a soil full of the most noxious and ineradicable weeds. And that after good herbs and plants and flowers have been sown, then he has to weed and water and fence and watch that garden night and day and all his life. Till the Lord of the garden is able to come and recreate and regale Himself where once there was nothing but weeds, and stones, and noxious vermin. Prayer, howsoever perfect in itself it may be, must always be directed in upon the performance of good works. We must not content ourselves with the gift of prayer, or with liberty and consolation and gust in prayer. We must come out from prayer the most rapturous and sweet only to do harder and ever harder works for God and our neighbour. Otherwise the prayer is not good, and the gusts are not from God.