learning, but rising, by God's grace, to the sublimest prayer.
In order to pray with fruit and without distraction, it is very useful and in most cases necessary, to spend some time in meditation or pious thought on some definite subject, and from this fact, as before stated, the whole exercise is often called meditation, instead of mental prayer. This often misleads people into imagining that meditation, that is, the use of the intellect in thinking on a holy subject, is the main end to be aimed at, whereas in fact it is only a means to the end, which is prayer or conversation with God. Meditation furnishes us with the matter for conversation, but it is not itself prayer at all. When thinking and reflecting the soul speaks to itself, reasons with itself; in prayer it speaks to God.
Meditation in its wide sense is any kind of attentive and repeated thought upon any subject and with any intention, but in the more restricted sense in which it is understood as a part of mental prayer, it is, as St. Francis de Sales puts it, "an attentive thought, voluntarily repeated or entertained in the mind, to excite the will to holy and salutary reflections and resolutions." It differs from mere study in its object: we study to improve our minds and to store up information, we meditate to move the will to pray and to embrace good. We study that we may know, we meditate that we may pray.
We must then use the mind in thus thinking or pondering on a sacred subject for a few minutes, and in order to help the mind in this exercise, we must have some definite subject of thought upon which it is well to read either a text of Holy Scripture or a few lines out of some other holy book. St. Teresa tells us that she thus helped herself with a book for seventeen years. By this short reading, the mind is rendered attentive and is set on a train of thought. Further to help the mind you can ask yourself some such questions as the following: What does this mean? What lesson does it teach me? What have
