praying. While we are reciting the Our Father and the Hail Marys of each decade of the rosary, we meditate or reflect on some mystery connected with the life of Jesus Christ or of His blessed Mother.
It is also useful, in using the prayers of our prayer-book, to read them slowly and deliberately, making in the meantime practical reflections on their contents, or pausing from time to time to meditate a little and apply the words of the prayers to our own wants. If we accustom ourselves to recite our vocal prayers in this way, we shall not only make them our own and pray well, but we shall also gradually acquire the habit of making mental prayer, which tends to unite us more closely to God, and, through the practical imitation of our divine Saviour's virtues, to render us conformable to Him.
Mental Prayer
PRAYER is called by St. Gregory Nazianzen a conference, or conversation with God. St. John Chrysostom speaks of prayer as a discourse with the divine majesty. According to St. Augustine it is the raising up of the soul to God. St. Francis de Sales describes it as a conversation of the soul with God, by which we aspire to Him and breathe in Him, and He, in return, inspires us and breathes on us.
Father Bertrand Wilberforce, in his tract on "Mental Prayer, " writes:
All prayer is the speaking of the soul to God. This may be done in three ways. For the prayer may be either in thought only, unexpressed in any external way, or on the other hand the secret thoughts and feelings of the soul may be clothed in words; and these words, again, may either be confined to a set form, or they may be words of our own, unfettered by any form, and expressing the emotions of our soul at the moment. In the first case
