September 26

Tenth Thursday after Trinity

Pray with the spirit. I CORINTHIANS xiv. 15.

Now prayer, to be real, must be the concentrated energy of our whole spirit, and we must open ourselves to God. There is nothing which is at once so reanimating and so exhausting as prayer. This pouring out of ourselves, this resolute holding of our souls in a fixed attitude, be it of surveying sin for confession, or listening for absolution, or of intercession, or of supplication, or of praise, requires the fullest tension of our powers; and the realizing God's presence, the laying hold by faith of Him as our portion, the casting ourselves indeed upon Christ the Lord, the committing the whole stream and utterance of thought, longing, feeling, to blend with His prevailing intercessions; the guarding against anything coming between Him and us; the watching, above all, against the intrusion of self between ourselves and Him, against the growing up of a morbid self-contemplation under a religious light instead of the simple fixing of the eye of faith on Him;—all this taxes to the utmost all the faculties of our souls. From this, then, it is that idleness tempts us to shrink. We are tempted to muse, to lose ourselves in abstractions, to waste our time of devotion in an endless flitting of the soul from thought to thought; settling nowhere, mastering nothing, we are tempted by every conceivable temptation to escape from the tension and closeness and exhaustion of wrestling. "I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me."

Man's weakness waiting upon God Its end can never miss, For men on earth no work can do More angel-like than this.