mind, and with an affection well disposed for the union which we aim at in this holy exercise.
Chap. VI. On the manner of meditating and discoursing in prayer, and how we are to resist distractions that then assail us.
The work of the understanding, which we call meditation, is one of the most difficult and hard that there is in mental prayer. For though it is easy to meditate upon divers things, running from one to another without order or method, yet it is very difficult to meditate upon one thing alone with attention, having the memory and understanding fixed upon God, without being distracted and diverted to other things. Even the greatest saints were wont to be sometimes molested by this, and complain of it. Job said of himself, " My thoughts are dissipated, tormenting my heart; they have turned night into day [1] because they deprive me of the quietness of recollection, in which I was wont to spend the night. And David cried to God, saying, " My heart hath forsaken me," and has departed from my house: " be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me" [2] from this trouble.
This very evil we all have experience of, and it is wont to proceed from divers roots and beginnings: i. From the Devil, to hinder us from the fruit of prayer, ii. From our own imagination, which is free, untamed, unstable, and illgoverned, iii. From some affections unmortified, which draw our thoughts after them; for "where" the "treasure is there" is also the " heart." [3] iv. From cares which sting and divide the heart into a thousand parts, v. From weakness and coldness, through not enforcing nor applying ourselves to this noble exercise, vi. From ignorance, through not knowing how to reason or meditate, or how to search
