The best instruction that I can give you, as preparatory to the spirit of prayer, is already fully given, where we have set forth the original perfection, the miserable fall, and the glorious redemption of man. It is the true knowledge of these great things that can do all for you, which human instruction can do. These things must fill you with a dislike of your present state, and create an earnest longing after your first perfection. For prayer cannot be taught you, by giving you a book of prayers, but by awakening in you a sense of what you are, and what you should be; that so you may see, and know, and feel, what things you want, and are to pray for. For a man does not, cannot pray for any thing because a fine petition for it is put into his hands, but because his _own_ condition is a _reason_ and _motive_ for his asking for it. And therefore it is, that this tract began with a discovery of these high and important matters, at the sight of which the world, and all that is in it, shrinks into nothing, and every thing past, present, and to come, awakens in our hearts a continual prayer, and longing desire, after God and eternity. _Academicus._ But surely you do not take this to be right in general, that the common people, who are mostly of low understandings, should kneel down in private, without any form of prayer, saying only what comes into their own heads. _Theophilus._ It would be wrong to condemn a manual _as such_, or to say that none ought to make use of it; but it cannot be wrong, to shew, that prayer is the natural language of the heart, and such, does not want any form or borrowed words. Now all that has been said of manuals of prayers, only amounts to thus much; that they are not necessary, nor the most natural and excellent way of praying. If they happen to be necessary to any person, it is because the natural prayer of his heart is already engaged, loving, wishing, and longing after, the things of this life; which makes him so insensible of his spiritual wants, so blind and dead to the things of God, that he cannot pray for them, but so far as the words of other people are put into his mouth.