selves with this atmosphere, as the diver with his bell before he descends into the sea.

Prayer is represented in the gospel as a holy and solemn act, which we cannot surround with too many precautions, lest anything worldly or profane should disturb the reverential intimacy of this communion of the creature with his Creator. If prayer is oftenest presented to us by the sacred writers as the means of Christian life, one might sometimes think, to hear them, that prayer is its end, and that we must, alternately, pray in order to be able to live. Christianly, and live Christianly in order to be able to pray. Prayer prepares for acts of self-abnegation, courage, and charity; and in their turn, acts of charity, courage, and abnegation prepare for prayer.

To make prayer an end, and to regulate our life with reference to this solemn moment, supposes an advance in the way of holiness, and a delicacy of Christian sentiment, to which we attain only by degrees.

Prayer, which has a right over our whole life, nevertheless claims from it a place apart and consecrated hours. This act of prayer, unless an effort be made to concentrate it, will turn into a superficial emotion and a vague reverie; thought and reflection, without which no serious act gets accomplished, will cease to form part of it; and prayer, which ought to be an exercise, a labour of the soul, will only be (God forgive it us) a sort of amusement to it. There is almost always dangerous presumption in the

neglect of ordinary means; as in the faithful use of them there is a salutary exercise of submission and humility. The neglect of means of grace comes nearer than may be supposed to the contempt of them. This disdain of the external form may gradually go so far that the very object to which the form belongs will melt and vanish away; and it is much to be feared that he who disdains to enter into his closet to pray, will end sooner than he imagines by praying nowhere. . . . Means are despised; but prayer is also a means; and if it be thought unworthy of one's-self to reserve for it certain stated hours, one will probably end in considering it unworthy of one's-self to pray at all.

In all times the Church has sufficed to the Church, truth to truth. Eloquence and enthusiasm have done less for this sacred cause than the modest virtues, the uniform activity, and patient prayers of millions of the faithful, whose names are utterly unknown.

We do not pray with the understanding, but with the heart.

Prayer is the only regular and complete form of religious thought..

The child of God has great privileges, but the greatest of all is to know how to supplicate.

He that prays is nearer to Jesus Christ than the apostles were.

Isolated and guided entirely by his individual opinion, it is probable that man would only offer a

very simple worship to the object of his adoration. But his relations with his fellow-creatures soon tend to complicate forms. He thinks more forms needed to act upon his family, than to act upon himself.

Religious services are of such importance for keeping up religion amongst the masses, that they alone often do, in that respect, what truth would not so certainly do.

It is important to embody the sentiments and fundamental ideas of religion. Life can no more dispense with symbols than language with metaphors: a ritual is an acted metaphor.

Adoration is a state of soul that can only be expressed by song.

3. Biographies (Study of Self; Narrative of Experience); Death; Miscellaneous Thoughts.

In order that biographies should offer a really religious interest, they must, above all, be true; that is to say, they must be complete. What is wanted here, is not precept, but example; it is not a theory, or even a symbol, of Christian life; it is a Christian life itself.

The true, the best monument of a beautiful life, is the detailed account of it; it is a monument which not only commemorates, but informs and instructs.

A long narrative may be made of an empty life, in which there have been many vicissitudes;

while a very full life has sometimes been written in few pages, nay, in only one. But it is with a full life as with a solid body: it may be of any dimensions. To follow the lines is not enough for the biographer; if he does not penetrate into the interior, if he does not dig far below the surface, he has told us nothing, and the man does not get known.

It is not very certain that the mutual recital of our intimate experiences, even from one man to another, be unattended with disadvantages. How then should such confidence, to the first comer or the public, be free from danger? We believe to have ascertained that a truly earnest faith, a faith realized in life, produces two counterbalancing effects; the first to arm us with frankness, the second to inspire us with reserve.

It has been said that the soul has its modest shrinking from exposure as well as the body, and that religious sentiment, or rather a living faith, renders this feeling far more delicate and timid. At a lower degree of religious life, we are at once less frank and more indiscreet; in proportion as the inner life develops and strengthens, both candour and discretion increase.

The advice to keep a daily and detailed journal has sometimes been too unqualifiedly given. We must not speak overmuch of self, even to blame it; but it is useful to take note of the most important facts of our life.

There is a principle of death, partial death, in the

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habit of insisting on, of realizing our own sin and poverty, instead of dwelling with delight on the goodness of God. We do not fall so far as despair, I know; because, arrived at its brink, we are held back by the remembrance of Jesus Christ as by a chain which makes itself felt at the very moment that it is strained to the utmost, so that we can no longer take an onward step towards the abyss, unless, indeed, it were to break; we do not, then, arrive at despair, but at a deep depression. The soul, in spite of the rays which from time to time shine on it from the side of the cross, is habitually sad, and feeble in proportion. It had thought it enough to look at Jesus once for all; but the fact is, we must be constantly looking to him or else at sin. The eye, unless it be blind, has no other alternative; and if it be certain that we shall not lose sight of our own sinfulness by looking at Christ crucified,– that sinfulness being as it were engraved upon his cross, it is also certain, that in contemplating our own misery, we may lose sight of Jesus Christ, because the cross is not naturally engraved in the image of that misery. . . . It is not in our own wounds, but in those of Jesus, that we must put our hands.

The idea of death, steadfastly contemplated, con tains or recalls all infinite ideas.

Death is the tie that binds all morality.

We must have already tasted the heavenly life, to prefer it, without hesitation and without reserve, to

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