No vice can harbour in you, no good desire languish, when once your heart is in this method of prayer; never beginning to pray, till you first see how matters stand with you; asking your heart what it wants, and having nothing in your prayers, but what the known state of your heart puts you upon _demanding_, _saying_, or _offering_ unto God. Such a prayer gives new life and growth to all your virtues; whereas, overlooking this true prayer of your own heart, and only at certain times taking a prayer that you find in a book, you have nothing to wonder at, if you are every day praying, and yet every day sinking farther under your infirmities. For your life can only be altered by that which is the real working of your heart. And if your prayer is only a form of words, made by the skill of other people, such a prayer can no more change you into a good man, than an _actor_ upon the stage, who speaks kingly language, is thereby made a king. Again, another great and infallible benefit of this kind of prayer is this; it is the only way to be delivered from the deceitfulness of your own heart. Our hearts deceive us, because we are absent from them, taken up in outward things, in outward rules and forms of living and praying. But this kind of praying, which takes all its thoughts from the state of our hearts, makes it impossible for us to be strangers to ourselves. The strength of every sin, the power of every evil temper, the most secret working of our hearts, the weakness of any or all our virtues, is seen with a noon-day clearness, as soon as the heart is made our prayer-book, and we pray for nothing, but according to what we read and find there. _Academicus._ O _Theophilus_, you have shewn me, that the best prayer in the world is that which the heart sends forth from itself. And yet I am not free from suspicions about it: I apprehend it to be that very _praying_ by the _spirit_, or as _moved_ by the spirit, or from a _light within_, which is condemned as _Quakerism_. _Theophilus._ There is but one good prayer that you can possibly make; and that is a prayer as the Spirit of God _moves_ you in it, or to it. This alone is a divine prayer; no other prayer can possibly have any communion with God. Therefore to ridicule praying by the Spirit, or as moved by the Spirit, is ridiculing the _only_ prayer that is divine; and to reject and oppose it as a vain conceit, is to quench and suppress all that is holy, heavenly, and divine within us. For if this Holy Spirit does not live and move in us, and bring forth all the praying affections of our souls, we may as well think of reaching heaven with our hands, as with our prayers.