Excerpt from A Treasury of Meditation: Or Suggestions as Aids to Those Who Desire to Live a Devout Life Prayer is - as every Christian believes - an indispensable exercise in the spiritual life. It is, in fact, the characteristic mark and employment of a religious mind. That longing of the soul for higher things, which is a feature in all human life, has led men to pray. The soul is "by nature Christian," and all have, in one way or another, felt - "What are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer, Both for themselves and those who call them 'friend'?" Prayer is, then, for a Christian, a necessity. Prisoned here in the flesh, the soul, in its higher moments at any rate, beats against the bars of Time, as a bird against the bars of its cage, and longs to soar upward into higher worlds. By prayer it does this. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.