In the first place, what do we mean by prayer? Surely just this: that part of our active and conscious life which is deliberately orientated towards, and exclusively responds to, spiritual reality. The Being of God, Who is that spiritual reality, we believe to be immanent in all things: “He is not far from each one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being.” In fact, as Christians we must believe this. Therefore in attending to those visible and concrete things, we are in a way attending to that immanent God; and in this sense all honest work is indeed, as the old proverb says, a sort of prayer. But when we speak of prayer as a separate act or activity of the self, we mean more than this. We mean, in fact, as a rule the other aspect of spiritual experience and communion; in the language of theology, attention to transcendent rather than to immanent Reality. Prayer, says Walter Hilton, in terms of which the origin goes back to the Neoplatonists, “is nothing else but an ascending or getting up of the desire of the heart into God, by withdrawing it from all earthly thoughts”—an ascent, says Ruysbroeck, of the Ladder of Love. In the same spirit William Law defines it as “the rising of the soul out of the vanity of time into the riches of eternity.” It entails, then, a going up or out from our ordinary circle of earthly interests; a cutting off, so far as we may, of “the torrent of use and wont,” that we may attend to the changeless Reality which that flux too often hides. Prayer stretches out the tentacles of our consciousness not so much towards that Divine Life which is felt to be enshrined within the striving, changeful world of things; but rather to that “Eternal truth, true Love, and loved Eternity” wherein the world is felt to be enshrined; and in this act it brings to full circle the activities of the human soul—that “Swinging-wicket set between The Unseen and the Seen.” The whole of man’s life really consists in a series of balanced responses to this Transcendent-Immanent Reality; because man lives under two orders, is at once a citizen of Eternity and of Time. Like a pendulum, his consciousness moves perpetually—or should move if it be healthy—between God and his neighbour, between this world and that. The wholeness, sanity, and balance of his existence will entirely depend upon the perfection of his adjustment to this double situation; on the steady alternating beat of his outward swing of adoration, his homeward-turning swing of charity. Now, it is the outward swing which we are to consider: the powers that may be used in it, the best way in which these powers may be employed.